Kecamatan Abiansemal, Indonesia
“The Arc at Green School Bali enters a new era for organic architecture, with its 19-meter span arches, interconnected by anticlastic gridshell,” states Elora Hardy Creative Director, IBUKU.
Elora Hardy and Jörg Stamm of IBUKU have introduced “The Arc” at Green School Bali as a new era for organic architecture with its 19m span arches interconnected by anticlastic bamboo gridshells.
The new building is designed for a new community wellness space and gymnasium for the extraordinary campus.
The Arc is one of the latest buildings 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 gridshells which derive their strength from curving in two opposite directions.
The Arc is a feat of engineering; it required months of research and development and fine-tuning of tailormade 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 is a feat of engineering; it required months of research and development and fine-tuning of tailormade details,” states Rowland Sauls, Project Manager, IBUKU “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 are 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 gridshells.
These fields of gridshells appear to drape across the spaces between impossibly thin arches soaring overhead, giving a whimsy, intimacy and beauty to space.
Although the gridshells appear to hang from the arches, they actually hold them up.
“The gridshells use shape stiffness to form the roof enclosure and provide buckling resistance to the parabolic arches, states Neil Thomas, Director of Atelier One.
“The two systems together create a unique and highly efficient structure, able to flex under load allowing the structure to redistribute weight, easing localized forces on the arches.
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 Arch at Green School in Bali, Indonesia
Architects: IBUKU
Design Team: Elora Hardy, Jörg Stamm and Jules de Laage
Photographers: Tommaso Riva
