Research argument

Kerala witnessed a housing boom that resulted in large scale environmental exploitation and the resource intensity of contemporary housing is being widely critiqued. The environmental costs of contemporary construction come mainly from its dependency on fossil energy for the production of high energy materials like cement, steel, tiles etc and also the GHG emissions. Also the need for low energy materials like sand, brick and stone in large quantities result in irreversible environmental damages from extensive river sand extraction, conversion of paddy land for brick kilns, and excessive stone quarrying. This research explores the possibility of using Bamboo for housing construction in Kerala because of its inherent material qualities and environmental advantages over contemporary materials. It is a hardy plant, growing widely across the state and is relatively easy to cultivate. It matures 6 times faster than typical wood, regenerates about 30% of its’ bio-mass every year and a typical bamboo culm is ready for harvest in about 5 years. Bamboo requires very little energy for production of about 30 MJ/m³ per N/mm² compared to concrete, steel and timber that require 240, 500 and 80 MJ/m³ per N/mm² respectively. Processing of bamboo requires only 1/8th of the energy that of concrete and 1/50th that of steel. But the bamboo construction is still restricted to temporary structures and indigenous housing in India and most parts of the world primarily due to its social stigma as ‘poor man’s timber’.  Kerala has 520 km² of dense bamboo forests and 30% of this is in the hilly district of Wayanad in the northern belt. Traditions of building with bamboo also persist alongside cultural preference for bamboo houses in the hilly parts of Kerala, especially Wayanad, but the major construction demand for houses continues to be in the urbanising plains, where high status RCC and masonry construction are dominant. The facts that the state has urbanised uniformly and the housing demand in more urbanised districts is still for low density, single unit, residences supports the belief that a customised bamboo solution designed for the local user requirements could find wide adoption. This research investigates the possibility of reinventing bamboo as a preferred material for meeting the future housing demand in Kerala by balancing the promises that the material hold with its challenges, like social acceptability, technical adequacy, capacity building, the polity environment etc. A housing design for the upper middle class is formulated as an important step in assessing the economic and environmental feasibility of bamboo construction. The objectives of the design are to meet the requirements of the minimum  aspirational house of the typical Keralite and also to quantify the economic and environmental advantages of this bamboo house when compared with contemporary housing. Potential reductions in cost, time and labour requirements and the embodied energy and CO² emissions of major building materials are examined through comparisons with those of contemporary construction.