Lee Feist, a graduate student at the Montana State University School of Architecture (MSU SoA), presented a research paper titled “Glazing Bamboo: A Case Study of Bamboo Design and Construction in the Northwestern United States” at the Twenty-Eighth International Conference of the Ibero-American Society of Digital Graphics (SIGraDi 2024) in Barcelona, Spain, on November 15, 2024.

The work presented in this paper builds upon the current research in bamboo material and construction technology and is co-authored by Feist, James Park, an assistant professor at the MSU SoA, and Andrew Vernooy, a professor at the MSU SoA . It proposes a set of three prototype building assembly designs that couple bamboo and glass, along with a pilot pavilion design in the Northwestern United States that employs these assembly designs. This aims to expand the current paradigm of bamboo architecture by proposing a new design and construction method of actively combining bamboo and glass and introducing a bamboo structure to an unanticipated region where this proposed method of coupling of bamboo and glass can be examined for a range of architectural issues that are both global and uniquely local to the region.

The work first focuses on the physical challenge in the coupling of bamboo and glass in their continuously bendable and standard planar forms respectively and presents a set of three prototype assemblies of bamboo and glass designed and assessed in solid modeling. These assemblies are then assessed in terms of their aesthetic qualities and structural characteristics in preparation for the design of the pavilion with specific programmatic requirements and site context. The work concludes with a discussion organized around the following three questions:

  • How do the new bamboo and glass prototype assemblies proposed in this work and the pavilion design introduced to the Northwestern United States suggest an expansion of the current paradigm of bamboo architecture?
  • How does the design showcase some of the distinctive merits of bamboo as a construction material in terms of structural integrity and environmental sustainability?
  • What are some cultural implications of the design introduced to the new region?

The paper presented is an installment of a research project that originated from Feist's coursework with Vernooy and Park in Spring 2024, under “ARCH 575: Professional Paper” and “ARCH 577: Reader Critique for Professional Paper”, and it was developed as part of Feist's independent study with Park in Summer 2024, under “ARCH 471: Directed Research/Creative Act”. The conference travel was supported in part by the Student Scholarship Grant from the MSU SoA and the Block Grant from the Montana State University College of Arts and Architecture.

The paper was presented at SIGraDi which is a major international conference on computer-aided architectural design since the 1990s. This year, over 600 abstracts were submitted and around 250 papers were invited for presentation and publication. The conference employs a double-blind, two-stage peer review of the abstracts and full papers. The accepted papers will be published in a proceedings book with an ISBN, which will be available on the CumInCAD and Blucher Design Proceedings open access platforms.

Lee Feist with group at SIGraDi in Barcelona Spain 2024.

 

 From left to right:

 Kurt Hong (Assistant Professor, University of Kansas),     James Park (Assistant Professor, Montana State       University), Anastasija Vidovic (Graduate Student,   Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia), and     Lee Feist (Graduate Student, Montana State University)   at SIGraDi 2024 in Barcelona, Spain, November 13–15,   2024.