The Taiwan Bamboo Society plans to promote a three-year bamboo structure design talent cultivation program, with the first-year program themed "2021 Bamboo Architecture and Forestry Railway New Talent Exhibition."
The region traversed by the Alishan Forest Railway is rich in ecological resources, featuring the growth of various bamboo species across tropical, warm-temperate, and temperate zones. Timber once served as a common thread intersecting the Pingpu, Tsou, Han, and Japanese cultures, and bamboo materials could be found everywhere in the everyday lives of these diverse cultures. We will use bamboo to construct related public facilities along the forest railway, blending traditional spirit with modern thinking to deliver a new spatial experience and expand the imaginative applications of domestic bamboo materials. We look forward to the warmth and flexibility of bamboo connecting the memories of the past era and opening up the scenery for a new generation.
The project plans to invite six school teams and six emerging architectural professionals. Through experimental creation, the student teams will become familiar with the characteristics of domestically produced bamboo and explore the future potential of bamboo construction. Meanwhile, the professional teams will create small-scale bamboo structures that balance practicality, social impact, aesthetics, and weather resistance, demonstrating the adaptability of bamboo structures in modern life. Through this process, bamboo craftsmen, architectural designers, and the general public will be naturally connected, achieving the three major goals of "heritage," "innovation," and "marketing" for bamboo culture and industry.
On February 26, 2021, we launched the "Bamboo Construction Co-learning" program. In the morning, we visited Der Feng Wood Industry and Yueh Shan Workshop in Zhushan to learn about methods for bamboo durability treatment, namely high-temperature drying and smoking. In the afternoon, we visited the bamboo workshop of Bio-Architecture Formosana to understand the making of bamboo joints.
The six architectural design teams participating in this project also presented their conceptual proposals today and had thorough discussions regarding their feasibility.
