Question: How expensive is it to bild a house of Bamboo?

Natasha Watson answered on 13 Mar 2013:

Hello Dweezil2000!

This question depends on many many things unfortunately; where is this house being built? How big is it? How tall is it? How warm do you want it to be? How ‘flashy’ do you want it to look?

Some people in South America build their houses out of bamboo cos its available and it provides them with all the shelter they need. Like this:
This house would have cost minimal amounts of money as they would have cut the bamboo down themselves for free and then made the house themselves too.

But then at the other end of the spectrum there are places like this: http://www.archdaily.com/34946/ecological-children-activity-and-education-center-24h-architecture/
Even though its a children’s activity centre, it could be used as a house very easily (well, i’d like to live in it!) and this would cost a lot because of the design (architect fees) and then the calculations (engineer fees) and then the builders themselves would need paying. The materials wouldn’t be the expensive bits of the building, the time and work done by the desigers and the builders is what would cost the money.

Ultimately building out of bamboo has risks when the people designing the house don’t know how to build with it and so will take more time learning about it and bamboo will require testing as well.

Also it would be silly to build a house out of bamboo in the UK as the bamboo would need to be shipped in. It would be better to build a house out of timber and straw in the UK.

I hope this answers your question well enough!

Tish

p.s. Simon Velez is a famous architect who builds out of bamboo, search him on Google and take a look at some of his stuff!