The Keeng Seafood Restaurant complex consists of conference halls, private dining rooms, a kitchen, and a bamboo hall. The bamboo hall stands out with its lightly curved boat-shaped thatched roof, supported by bamboo structures resembling fanning palm plants. The restaurant’s owner required the architects to design an impressive building that would become the hallmark of … Read more
The Copeaux Cabana workshop is an example of their practices and skill, including the selection of trees in the forest, squaring with an ax and adze and/or mobile saw and chainsaw, curved wood, The whole thing was carried out with hundreds of hands participating in its construction. …there’s still some roofing, a tower to raise, … Read more
The Imagina cultural center on the outskirts of León, Mexico, is housed in a big, multistory facility, constructed mostly from locally dug adobe soil; it is engineered using bioconstruction techniques, a holistic building technique that aims to achieve a circular economy, minimizing waste and benefiting people. In fact, all 3,500 square meters (about 37,700 square … Read more
I once used a prefabricated steel Quonset hut as a basis for building a combination garage/workshop/office/storage room. It worked very well for these purposes and was quite inexpensive. I called it my Carriage House and you can read more about it and even buy plans for it at dreamgreenhomes.com. So when I saw this article about … Read more
The Luum Temple in Tulum, Mexico is a pioneering example of what happens when traditional wisdom meets modern engineering. It is designed to stand against hurricane winds and significant seismic forces. The structural system has five intersecting hyperbolic paraboloids made of bamboo arches and split bamboo beams. Due to bamboo’s lightweight nature, particular attention must … Read more
Turkey has long been known for its labyrinth of underground cities, and archaeologists now believe that they may have discovered the largest one yet. Sarayini was once used as a shelter by local Christians who were persecuted by the Roman empire and local Muslim leaders and needed to protect themselves from raids. The 215,000-square-foot ancient … Read more