bamboo u, bali

what it was

In June 2025 the studio took a place on the eleven-day Bamboo Build and Design Course at the Bamboo U campus at Kul Kul Farm in Bali — a programme run with IBUKU, the practice behind Green School Bali and Green Village Bali. The course is structured as four days of foundation work — bamboo philosophy, sustainable forestry and propagation, treatment, scale modelling, joinery — followed by six days of full-scale building with the resident master carpenters, a downtime day, and a closing certificate day. Eleven days is short. It is also long enough to leave the campus with a working vocabulary for how to read a culm and how to put two of them together.

For the studio it did two things at once. It supplied a Southeast-Asian baseline against which to read Mizo bamboo culture honestly — Indonesia’s bamboo economy, joinery traditions, and treatment methods are an order of magnitude more developed than the northeast-Indian equivalents, and walking the IBUKU office, the Bamboo Pure factory, and the Green School site is a faster education in what a serious bamboo industry looks like than any volume of papers. And it was the first place a long-standing studio question — what would a tawlailir look like if it were drawn for now — could be answered in physical material, with the tools and the species range to actually try.

the course

The technical content the studio took the most from:

• Forestry and harvest. Clump management, age-at-harvest, and the seasonal moisture window — a cluster of decisions that set a culm’s mechanical and acoustic life long before any tool touches it.
• Treatment. The boron-and-borax immersion process at the Bamboo Pure factory at industrial scale — the species, time, and concentration variables that decide whether a culm survives borer and fungal attack for forty years or for three.
• Joinery systems. Whole joints, fishmouths, lashing, bolt joints, and hybrid connections — taught with the discipline that each connection is a load-path decision, not a stylistic one.
• Scale modelling. Small-scale fabrication as a design tool, before any full-scale culm is cut.

Master carpenters Asmara Jaya and Moko Sumerta led the build days. Architect Mike Linthon and Luis Echeverría held the design and coordination side.

the scooter

The studio’s build for the course was a bamboo-only scooter — a small-scale, human-powered prototype drawn from the tawlailir, the traditional Mizo single-axle cart. The brief was direct: take a piece of Mizo material culture seriously enough to redraw it for the present, and do it without leaning on metal fasteners. Farmers in central Mizoram routinely cover up to four hours a day on foot between farm, home, and market; a low-cost, locally-fabricable, bamboo-only mobility object is a legible answer to that question before any further engineering is asked of it.

Five species were worked into the prototype, drawn from the campus stock:

• Dendrocalamus asper (bambu petung)
• Dendrocalamus asper niger (bambu petung hitam)
• Gigantochloa apus (bambu tali)
• Gigantochloa atroviolacea (bambu tali hitam)
• Thyrsostachys siamensis (bambu jakarta)

The frame was cut, drilled, and assembled through pinned and lashed joinery; the wheels were laminated bamboo. No metal fasteners. The prototype carried load and held together — enough to confirm the geometry and the joinery strategy, and enough to send the studio home with a clearer next problem.

what came after

The bali scooter is the seed of the bambam kart — the full-size cart now in build with NOA Mobility, drawn from the same tawlailir geometry but engineered for road loads, Mizo species, and a wider bed. The scooter answered the geometric question. The kart is where the engineering question gets answered.

status

Complete. Prototype scooter built and documented at the Bamboo U campus, June 2025. Successor work is tracked under bambam kart.