"Taking Bamboo to New Heights," with Jonas Hauptman (Best of "The Secrets of Mastery")

On this edition of “The Secrets of Mastery,” a production of Craftsmanship Magazine, we’re talking about taking bamboo to new heights. 

Jonas Hauptman, an industrial design professor at Virginia Tech, has been experimenting with ways to use bamboo, a giant grass, to build multi-story housing. 

Hauptman says bamboo could be key to housing the world’s growing population in a more ecological way.  

Bamboo culms, or stalks, can be harvested in just 3-5 years, and they grow back in place from the same rhizome bulb. Contrary to wood, steel or concrete, bamboo is lightweight, making it easier to transport, and cheaper to use on the construction site. 

For the past seven years, Hauptman has collaborated with organizations in Ecuador and other countries in the Global South to experiment with bamboo construction, which includes planing bamboo stalks and turning them into panels. 

Hauptman has had his hands on many different materials throughout his varied career as an entrepreneurial craftsperson. He’s a trained blacksmith, he’s made modernist furniture out of tree flakes, and while living in Los Angeles, he researched how to divert palm tree fronds away from the landfill. 

I sat down with Hauptman to learn more about his ambitions with bamboo, and to find out how his hands-on experimentation with materials informs his design work. 

LINKS: 

Jonas Hauptman at Virginia Tech: https://design.vt.edu/faculty-staff/faculty/industrial-design/hauptman-jonas.html

Craftsmanship Magazine: https://craftsmanship.net/

Other episodes of Craftsmanship Magazine's “The Secrets of Mastery” series: https://craftsmanship.net/interviews/

Sign up for Craftsmanship Magazine on Substack: https://craftsmanship.substack.com/

Transcript

Pauline Bartolone: This is The Secrets of Mastery, a series of conversations with artisans about what it takes to master their craft and what their journey has taught them. I'm Pauline Bartolone, and this is a production of Craftsmanship Magazine, a multimedia publication about artisans and innovators. Who are creating a world built to last. On this edition, we're talking to someone who's trying to take bamboo to new heights.

Jonas Hauptman is an industrial design professor at Virginia Tech. He's also an inventor. With a keen interest in meeting human needs in the most ecological way. He's trained as a blacksmith. He's made modernist furniture out of tree flakes and researched how to divert palm tree fronds away from the landfill.

But now Hauptman is focused on bamboo and specifically how to use it to build multi-story housing. 

Jonas Hauptman: It's not that I'm interested in bamboo, particularly. I'm interested in a unitized material that quickly regenerates that warehouses carbon, and that can readily be turned into a building system. And most importantly, and can do that in the global south, where the tremendous need for housing will be between now and 2050, and where immense amounts of carbon will be released in the production of steel and concrete if we don't find another solution. 

Pauline Bartolone: Bamboo culms or stalks can be harvested in just three to five years and grow back in place from the same rhizome bulb. The giant grass is lightweight, making it easier to transport and cheaper to use on the construction site. As part of his research, Hauptman planes bamboo stalks, turns them into panels, and tries to debunk the public's idea that the giant grass is only suitable for a one story hut on a tropical island.

I sat down with Hauptman to learn more about his ambitions with Bamboo and to find out how his hands-on experimentation with materials informs his design work. 

So it seems like your current project is to figure out a way to scale up bamboo's use in construction, particularly in non westernized nations like South America, Asia, Africa, and Bamboo has mostly been applied in one or two story buildings internationally…

Jonas Hauptman: Correct, I mean, there's really maybe a handful of buildings in the whole world that have ever been made even experimentally taller than maybe, I don't know, eight meters ten meters tall that use bamboo. 

Pauline Bartolone: So I guess, why are you setting out to make bamboo used in mid-rise or high-rise construction? 

Jonas Hauptman: Because I believe that the world is urbanizing and that the urban majority of people need good housing. And that if we're gonna make that good housing not be climate negative, we have to find material that can do that. And it just happens that bamboo. Occupies the same zones of the world. The tropical bamboo is the same zones of the world that need lots of housing. 

Pauline Bartolone: And why isn't Bamboo used this way already? Like do, do you think it's been proven? 

Jonas Hauptman: No, it hasn't been proven. That's the thing. So basically there's a lot of unknowns. There's risk, there's and there's danger, and there's also prejudice. So the prejudice is, the Spaniards liked wood because they were from Europe and they had lots of wood.

They undermined the Latin American, you know, indigenous cultures the same way that the British pilgrims did to the North Americans. I mean, I. In Latin America, Europeans, in this case, Spaniards did the same thing with bamboo. They annihilated the bamboo to erase the culture and to basically starve the natives out of their way of life, partly out of arrogance and partly out of sheer aggression.

So that that prejudice is largely colonial elitism right at play. That's one reason, but there are a couple other really key reasons. The other is we didn't understand seismic design. We didn't realize that materials that have high ductile like bamboo could play an amazingly important role in making architecture lighter and savor to live in.

That was unknown until the last 50 years. And in Colombia there's a small, a town in the coffee grown region where all the cement houses basically fell over and killed people, and all the bamboo ones just went kind of sideways after a major earthquake. And that's when you know the world started waking up to, this has happened in Ecuador and in Columbia in the last 50 years where there's really recorded history of saying, wait a minute, there's something here in this ancestral knowledge with bamboo and building.

And then the other reason that that changed is until about 50 years ago, there was really no well-known way to preserve bamboo that was reliable. With chemical, um, treatment using borates, which is basically detergent, these acids, you can drive the sugar outta bamboo, replace it with these bate particles and the insects would eat that, not the sugars and therefore not reproduce and therefore the bamboo doesn't rot.

Pauline Bartolone: So you're developing this unique way of engineering bamboo that's not really typical to how it has been used traditionally. You're lightly modifying it, milling it, right? It has some flat sides, one or more flat sides. People usually use it in the raw form, or they heavily engineer it, right? They use the fibers to make different products, not just for construction, but for clothing or even beer. Why are you choosing this way of kind of lightly engineering bamboo? 

Jonas Hauptman: Sure. So basically round coal and bamboo making structures from round poles. It works pretty well, but it has some significant limitations and it also generates a lot of waste. So if you start with that, you say, oh, we have this material and process that works pretty well, but it generates waste and has limits to scale and it makes construction kind of slow and artisanal if you go to fix those problems.

I think an obvious place to land is where we are, right? So we wanna make it unitizable, we wanna make it easy to use and we want to be, we wanna make sure we can use a lot of the material. All of that makes sense. And then if you say, but why don't you just do what everybody else is doing and make it into, you know, make it into sausage, you know, make, make a composite from either fiber or from little tiny rectangular loads glued together.

And you could say, well, all those things make a lot of sense. In some context. They make really robust materials, but they also either use a ton of polymer chemistry, vis-a-vis glue, or they waste a tremendous amount of the biomass. So round coal and bamboo construction wastes at least 40% of the standing grown coal, at least, maybe more, maybe as much as 60, and so do most composites.

So our goal is to, is to use more of the bamboo. One of bamboo's challenges is it is not that cheap considering other material comparisons. An eight foot stick of bamboo might cost as much as a two by four. So our thought is if we can do minimal modification, use it near the source, then we can, we can keep a lot of the kind of the nature intelligence of morphology.

We can reduce the amount of waste and we wind up with a unitized material nonetheless. 

Pauline Bartolone: You're focusing your partnerships and your research in the global south, South America, Asia, you're looking for more partnerships in Africa, and you say the benefit is greater to societies there than, you know, in United States or Europe. Why isn't using bamboo in construction in the United States and Europe more, more practical? 

Jonas Hauptman: I wouldn't say that it's not practical. And in fact, a couple of companies that are making building products in, you know, for the North American or European markets or Australian markets are finding some traction.

There's a big upside, but there's also a really big mountain to climb. They're competing with wood products in the global south. There are, there's way less competition also. You're not importing the material. You're closer to the source. And as I said, if you look at like, developed countries they need less construction than developing countries, right?

So if you wanna look at the size of the market opportunity, not the dollars, but the units of necessary construction, it seems to me that the global south is the obvious choice and there's just a tremendous amount of need. I mean, the housing shortages are much more severe in the global south than they are in the developed world.

And if you want a big juicy problem to solve, go where the problem is, which is where there's a lack of housing and a lot of need. 

Pauline Bartolone: You have applied for a patent for creating these lightly modified bamboo structures that are created into a panel, right? I mean, did you physically mill the bamboo, and do you think that your design is stronger because you've had a hands-on relationship with that material? 

Jonas Hauptman: Definitely. Just as a, as a learner personally, I learn from doing better than any other way. I have dyslexia and ADHD, and so for me to learn tacitly is the best way to learn things. I can engineer structures, but if you asked me like what the calculations are, even what the terminology is often, I wouldn't know it, but I have a pretty good intuitive sense from.

From being a builder, I learned that sense from building, and it does affect my ability to design or engineer things as I've learned to build more things. Also, the kinds of problems I'm trying to solve, people will say, are not solvable. So if you want to find a solution, you're gonna have to figure it out for yourself, right?

It wouldn't matter whether I went to a bamboo industry person or a lumber person, or a technologist, in all cases, those people were like, oh no, that what you're trying to do, that doesn't work. It just can't do that. Well, that's just 'cause no one had done it before. It doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means that someone has to decide.

It's worth the risk of trying until they either fail or figure it out. And often you wind up figuring it out. But often on the way you fail a lot too. We've published a book chapter, we've made a whole bunch of different saw machines. Not a single one of them has worked perfectly, you know, and forever, like the current one we have in Ecuador right now, it works for a few hundred cuts and then we bent the arbor 'cause we used too cheap of a motor, for example.

Or you know, we'll use some method to move the bamboo through the machine. We think it's nice and accurate. And then you find out, oh, actually it's not perfect, accurate, and you need another step in the process. So we're continually learning, but you know. It. When people say it can't be done, they're not totally wrong, but they're not totally right either.

And so only by doing can we prove. The slip is between people's assumptions and reality, and in many ways, that's what I think the essence of craft is. It really is making with innovation, but also with historical knowledge. So we don't ignore the historical knowledge. We try to advance it in new ways, to do things with as much elegance, but maybe better and more efficiently too.

Pauline Bartolone: Jonas Hauptman is an inventor, a craftsperson and assistant professor of industrial design at Virginia Tech. Check out his collaborative work in Ecuador with the Regeneration Field Institute. They're training local builders and students to construct bamboo bus stops, homes and stores. That's regeneration field institute.com and that's it for this edition of The Secrets of Mastery Music in the series is by Blue Dot Sessions.

For more stories about plant-based materials, check out craftsmanship on Substack. And if you haven't already, subscribe to the Secrets of Mastery podcast series at craftsmanship.net. That's craftsmanship.net. You'll find plenty of other stories there too. Thanks for listening.