Kecamatan Abiansema, Indonesia
Indonesia-based green design practice IBUKU designs an unprecedented structure that is not only an incredible piece of bamboo architecture but will serve as a reference in lightweight structures altogether.
Named The Arc, it is the newest building on campus at the world-renowned Green School in Bali, Indonesia.
The school has a 12-year history of breaking boundaries and expanding horizons and the Arc is the newest benchmark in that history, raising the bar for sustainable education around the world.
The first building of its kind ever made, The Arc at Green School is built from a series of intersecting 14-meter tall bamboo arches spanning 19 meters, interconnected by anticlastic grid shells which derive their strength from curving in two opposite directions.
The project required months of research, development, and fine-tuning of tailor-made details.
The result is a refined design with unparalleled beauty, which stands as a testament to IBUKU’s commitment to expanding horizons in architecture and design.
The Arc employs one of nature’s greatest strategies for creating large spaces with minimal structure.
Within a human ribcage, a series of ribs working in compression is held in place by a tensioned flexible layer of muscle and skin.
This creates a thin but strong encasement for the lungs. In the case of The Arc, arches working in compression are held in place by tensioned anticlastic grid shells.
These fields of grid shells appear to drape across the spaces between impossibly thin arches soaring overhead, giving a whimsy, intimacy, and beauty to the space.
Although the grid shells appear to hang from the arches, they actually hold them up.
The Arc’s counterintuitive orchestration of geometry brings the structure into a state of equilibrium, which means a dramatically decreased necessity for structural material.
This also means an unprecedented inner volume with an impossibly thin structure and without any distracting trusses.
Project: The Arc at Green School
Architects: IBUKU
Lead Architects: Elora Hardy
Project Architect: Rowland Sauls
Photographers: Tommaso Riva
