Elora Hardy: The Latest Architecture and News

Videos

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Last year we had the honor of visiting the incredible bamboo world created by John Hardy and his tribe in Bali, Indonesia. After visiting houses, a school, a hotel, some bridges, factories, a permaculture farm, an architecture office and many other structures created in bamboo, we were left speechless and not sure how to react.

Having emigrated from Canada aged 25, and after a successful 20-year career as a jeweler, John Hardy started out on a project that was very different to anything he had done before. Determined to find a system of building that was more natural and sustainable than standard building techniques, Hardy developed a system of building with bamboo that many now recognize as among the world's most successful (and beautiful) examples of sustainable craftsmanship. In recent years, Hardy's expertise has received global exposure, leading to TED Talks by John in 2010 and by his daughter Elora Hardy in 2015.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about bamboo - besides being an entirely natural, sustainable material with the tensile strength of steel that can grow up to 900 millimeters (3 feet) in just 24 hours - is that it's not more widely recognized as a fantastic construction material. Like many traditional building materials, bamboo no longer has the architectural currency that it once did across Asia and the pacific, but the efforts of Elora Hardy may help put it back into the vernacular. Heading up Ibuku, a design firm that uses bamboo almost exclusively, Hardy's recent TED Talk is an excellent run through of bamboo's graces and virtues in construction, showing off sinuous private homes and handbuilt school buildings.

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