The ZCB Bamboo Pavilion is a public event space built in the summer of 2015 in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong. It aims to promote innovative and ecological architectural design to the broader public through events and happenings. It is a 12m high, 37m spanning, bending-active bamboo gridshell structure with a footprint of approximately 350m2 and a seating capacity of 200 people. It is built from tensile fabric and 473 natural bamboo poles, hand-tied together with metal wire using techniques based on century-old traditional Cantonese bamboo scaffolding craftsmanship.

* Text may be generated using the automatic translation service DeepL.

Zero Carbon Building of the Construction Industry Council (Client)

Prof. Kristof Crolla (Principal Investigator, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of Architecture)

2015/10/15

For overseas use

ZCB Garden Area, Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong

The project is a public event space built for the Construction Industry Council (CIC)s Zero Carbon Building (ZCB). The client's ambition is to make the commercially pressured traditional Cantonese craftsmanship of Bamboo Scaffolding Building attractive again for future generations. It promotes this century old skill through innovative design adapted to a 21st century, ecologically aware context.

The project is a light-weight shell structure, carefully positioned above an existing wooden deck in an urban park. The thin surface folds onto itself, making three structural supporting legs.

The design intent was to showcase that traditional crafts are capable of much broader, more sustainable, and elegant outcomes when computational tools are strategically integrated in the workflow.

The project 1) promotes bamboo as a local culturally important and ecological construction material; 2) showcases the adaptation possibilities of traditional Cantonese Bamboo Scaffolding craftsmanship by introducing contemporary digital tools; 3) introduces the general public to the possibilities of light-weight, high-performance geometry; 4) provides a gorgeous meeting place for public events.

Because of its widely varying material properties, natural bamboo is rarely used in contemporary construction as a structural material. Yet it is one of the strongest and fastest growing carbon-absorbing plants. The ZCB Bamboo Pavilion is the first project of this scale to overcome the material limitations and use bamboos bending properties for its structural design. The implementation challenge was finding a way to manually construct the digitally generated complex geometry onsite with traditional means. A protocol was set up that used a clever sticker labelling system. This system required the manual bending of interconnected poles on top of a temporary scaffolding, followed by the tying together of crossing poles in the points with matching labels using metal wire.

- Covered area: 350m2 - Capacity: 200 people - Largest span: 37m - Height: 12.3m - Weight: 6,800kg (excl. foundation) - Total number of bamboo poles: 473 - Total Length of bamboo poles: 2956m - Average pole diameter: 12cm - Membrane area: 910m2