Bending Active System_ Bamboo Research Pavilion Using Robotic Arm and Steam Bending

Bamboo, a material brimming with immense, yet largely unexplored potential, particularly within the realm of architecture, stands as a testament to nature’s ingenuity. If we look at the current scenario, this fastest-growing, low-cost, carbon-sequestering natural resource remains an unconventional material, in the practice of Architecture, always given the peripheral roles of scaffoldings and at times more than that. This way the potential of such versatile material remains highly underutilized. It’s time to shift our perspective and explore the full potential of this protean material in the 21st century.  Bamboo embodies flexibility, stiffness, and efficiency in material distribution, yielding lightweight yet efficient systems. This nature’s extreme product offers high resistance to tensile stresses, buckling, and bending stresses and its elastic properties are remarkable. The research taps into these properties of bamboo to arrive at a spanning and spatial system that stems from its intrinsic properties. Traditional ways of using bamboo as a whole culm restrict the abilities of spanning, and bending, and make it more vulnerable to splitting. Bending activates the tensile capacity of the bamboo and allows for more efficient material distribution. Combining bamboo and digital fabrication enables radically unique and spatially versatile configurations. Digital fabrication with this irregular material is challenging but immensely rewarding, unlocking new possibilities for shaping this material. CNC routing can offer efficient and precise sectioning of bamboo culm and bending bamboo using robotic arms reduces the burden of custom Jig for each new bend profile. The research strives to derive material systems configured using variable cross-sections of bamboo culm across the length to explore spanning potential. Here variability in cross-sections responds to different positions, bending, loading conditions, and roles of members in the larger spanning system. Heterogeneity, porosity, and transversal anisotropic properties of Bamboo lend character and language to its construction and structural system. The density of bamboo culm varies in its diameter and by bending, the fibers are reorganized thus allowing the design of material distribution. The composition of bamboo culm, characterized by the unidirectionality of fibers, lateral diaphragms, hollow cross-sections, and variably lignified thin walls, is utilized here to its advantage. These features enable the configuration of diverse cross-sections of bamboo along its length. The process of making unearths the untested possibilities of this material, and ways of working with the tools allows the unforeseen construction problems on site. The making process brings our focus back to each element of the larger assemblage with increased scope improvisation, recalibration, and redesign. This immersive process of learning by doing in entirety, aids students, in improvising their thought process, in judgment of material behavior, using of right tool to save material, and developing novel ideas for production and assembly construction.