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Architects: BambuBuild
- Area: 400 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Hyroyuki Oki
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Manufacturers: Bambubuild
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Lead Architects: Tran Ba Tiep
Text description provided by the architects. Located in the center of Long Thanh, an animated town that is rapidly growing because there is a most important international airport project in southern Vietnam that is under construction. The restaurant complex consists of conference halls, private dining rooms, a kitchen, a toilet, and a bamboo hall. The bamboo hall stands out with its lightly curved boat-shaped thatched roof, supported by bamboo structures resembling nipa palms, a popular riverside plant in south Vietnam.
The ground floor plan of the bamboo hall is very simple; it can accommodate up to 180 guests, it is located in a convenient position of access, and easily connects to the annex house. The restaurant’s owner required the architects to design an impressive architecture that would become the hallmark of the complex, environmentally friendly materials are encouragingly used, and the construction should be fast.
In response to these requirements, bamboo is used for both structural element and decorative elements of the building. The “solid bamboo” species is very popular in southern Vietnam. It is also called “iron bamboo”, the name proves that it is very stiff bamboo, strong enough for building construction. In traditional construction methods, a bamboo pole is used as a post, beam, or truss with some limit of span column steps. After researching various structural surfaces, a hyperbolic paraboloid (hypars) surface is used because it is exceptionally stiff and extremely attractive. Hypars surfaces can carry great loads thanks to their curved shape and good resistance in all directions, so they are commonly used as roof structures.
The bamboo hall is composed of many hypars used as ceilings and columns. All of them are connected and interlocked with each other, allowing the overhanging roof to reach up to 4 meters at the gable roof. A hypar is a doubly-curved surface and doubly-ruled surface that can be easily constructed of straight structural members. Using the bamboo pole to build hypas structure is the perfect combination. The fact that curved surfaces are constructed of straight bamboo poles makes the construction easy and rapid. They can achieve exceptional stiffness and appealing form without bamboo bending.
However, the double curvature of the hypars makes it difficult for roofing with natural thatch because it has a convex form along one axis, and a concave form along the other. To solve this problem, the truss and the purlin are added to the concave side to make simple sloped roofs. This combination creates a two-layer structural roof, increasing the appeal of the ceiling. The bamboo structure is staged in a dramatic way. This project proves the huge potential of bamboo and hypars structure. These two may be the efficient performance of sustainable construction in the future.
