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Architects: Bambutec Design
- Area: 345 m²
- Year: 2018
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Photographer:Juan Dias
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Manufacturers: Alpargatas, Poly-Urethane, Tak^^e, Take
Text description provided by the architects. Deployable Bamboo Pavilion is a bio-based space structure built for the Social Service of Commerce SESC. The Pavilion is located on the banks of the Perequê-Açu River in the city of Paraty, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Erected on a green campus on the seaside Atlantic Forest and planned to roof an open space, without walls or partitions, hosting cultural and social activities. The Pavilion was designed to be immersed in the cultural life of the city of Paraty, with its natural beauties, tropical biodiversity, native culture and colonial history.
The Pavilion is a mobile self-supporting bamboo structure self-stressed by acrylic membranes and textile flexible joints. The roof spans 15x23 meters in a modular structural system. Prefabricated space frames and articulated connections in polyester cables and biocomposites are rapidly assembled, preserving bamboo bars free of torsion stresses. The design of the connections allows complex free-form geometries and a creative lightweight assembly procedure. Physical models and computer models were developed for the form-finding of the self-supporting bamboo structure. The structural design and analysis were developed through numerical models, scale models and full-scale prototypes in interaction.
The roof applies pantographic bamboo grids transported to the mounting site in a stowed state and deployed on the ground until reach its final geometry. The bamboo grids are covered by acrylic membranes generating form-active roofing modules. Each grid-membrane module weighs 110kgf, i.e. 1,5kgf/sqm. The built structure weighs 2.8tons, except for the reinforced concrete foundations, corresponding to 8kgf for square meter, resulting in an extremely lightweight space structure.
The assembly procedure doesn’t need cranes or heavy equipment. The modular structure is erected by a mobile lifting system using deployable bipods, pulleys and cables, performing a large number of assembly steps on the ground. The structure is fully reversible and mountable in 30 working days. The structure presents a silent and clean use of the assembly site, an agile execution, little waste generation, low energy consumption and minimal environmental impact in its lifecycle. The Deployable Bamboo Space Structure Pavilion presents a sustainable and low-embodied carbon lifecycle in the production, maintenance and post-use processes. The developed biomaterials can be fully packed and transported.
A novel sustainable technique for encapsulation of bamboo poles protects material for outdoor exposure, preserving culms against moisture, fungi and insects. The encapsulation technique applies a biocomposite coat of cotton fabrics, earth, PVA glue and castor-oil polyurethane polymer, protecting poles by an external bio-based thin shell. Encapsulation is a bioclimatic solution allowing the drying of bamboo poles even after its manufacturing, due the ability of the air exchange by differential pressure, that is, a treatment where the material breathes. It is suitable for building with bamboo, since culms produce starch even after its extraction from the forest. Bamboo poles are previously selected in the plantation, harvested and treated by smoke-penetration, free of chemical preservatives. The research received support of PUC-Rio, UFMG and FAPERJ.
