In Mumbai, a city permanently under construction and repair, bamboo scaffolding is ubiquitous. The city, with its concrete and brick architecture, is engulfed in humidity that possesses a violent capacity to invade the most solidly engineered materials. In these continually deteriorating conditions, it is common practice to erect scaffolding around a large building to continually plaster cracks and treat surfaces. Bamboo is everywhere. Yet in spite, or perhaps because of its ubiquity, bamboo is rendered invisible. By habit alone, pedestrians tend to see straight through it when it engulfs a building, and when it comes down, forget it ever existed.
The architectural profession’s interest in sustainability has brought the material of bamboo into focus. Bamboo is a kind of grass, one that refers to a number of species which have different physical properties—the Forest Survey of India lists about one hundred and twenty five different indigenous species to the subcontinent. Bamboo culms reproduce at a rapid rate, owing to their rhizomatic structure; a property that fulfills the Bruntland Commission’s definition of sustainable, in that in using it, we do not deplete it.1 It can quickly regenerate. This capacity for seemingly boundless growth is central to the imagination of bamboo as a material perfect for a regime of sustainability. Within the architectural profession, sustainability has emerged as a technoscientific and managerial concept, giving architecture’s social project a new purpose enmeshed in designing buildings while regulating quantitative metrics of emissions and carbon footprints.2 Yet rather than encapsulating these more technical aspects of sustainable architecture, bamboo merely embodies a material and an aesthetic image of sustainability; that it is in and of itself sustainable.
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