Situating My Practice: Lessons from Bali’s Green School

The Green School in Bali represents an enormous body of knowledge about contemporary bamboo practice. It’s the global reference point for bamboo innovation.

In 2024 I studied with Bamboo U, part of the architectural team responsible for many of the school’s recent structures.

The Green School (which today is the education base for over 1000 children) is basically the result of an experiment between three friends living in Bali: jeweller John Hardy, engineer Jorg Stamm and artist Aldo Landwehr. Since the early 2000s they have pioneered the understanding of various innovative large-scale bamboo forms including:

• reciprocal bamboo towers
• a cantilevered bamboo bridge
• various post-and-beam structures
• assorted Hyperbolic Paraboid structures
• many bamboo furniture innovations
• innovation in engineering, design, and iterative on-site fabrication

It’s a complete architectural and interiors’ bamboo language. Working with the people who actually built all this gave me a full-spectrum understanding of the toolkit of bamboo building.