Leading architectural Vietnamese practice VTN Architects (Vo Trong Nghia Architects) has been experimenting with natural and local materials since it was founded in 2006.
The practice has one main principle - working on each project as if the Earth had commissioned it, as if our precious planet was the client. To this aim founder Vo Trong Nghia and his collaborators have developed a series of aims and objectives: integrating trees into each piece of architecture they create as they have a positive effect on human beings; employing eco-friendly materials and traditional skills and making architecture for everybody and not just for a rich minority. Collaborating with Wind and Water House JSC, a construction company specializing in green buildings construction, VTN designed and built a series of sustainable structures in Vietnam.
One of VTN's structures was transported from Vietnam to Venice for the 16th International Architecture Exhibition. "Bamboo Stalactite" was assembled together with Vietnamese and Italian artchitects and craftsmen on the docks overlooking the water outside the Arsenale area. The structure combines modular systems and human craftsmanship and it is designed to be easily assembled and dismantled.
The name of the structure has got a particular meaning: the word stalactite hints indeed at the fact that the shape of the structure looks as if it were hanging from the sky, and touches the ground at points so as not to fly away.
The architectural practice behind this project has been working a lot with different natural materials and with bamboo in particular, conceived as an alternative to concrete, steel and wood.
Vo Trong Nghia actually calls bamboo - a lightweight material with high tensile strength, good bending quality (the way the material is worked, bent and tied generates strength, so that the structure only needs to be anchored), rapid growth rate and global availability - "the green steel of the 21st century" and the preliminary drawings for "Bamboo Stalactite" look indeed like steel reinforcement drawings for a concrete tensile roof.
Like other projects at this year's Venice Biennale, such as Andramatin's, "Bamboo Stalactite" integrates inexpensive, local materials and traditional skills with contemporary aesthetics and modern methodologies and offers a space where visitors can rest, relax, meet or debate about architecture, while kids can play in a stage-like industrial setting.
The structure is a bit reminiscent of the Ting Xi Bamboo Restaurant, a Xiamen-based building designed by VTN (while the shadows the woven bamboo sticks cast on the ground call to mind the intricate motifs of Burano lace, a great link with the local tradition...) and makes you think a lot about other purposes for these installations.
It would be intriguing for example to see if bamboo could be used to create temporary sets for fashion runways. In March Chanel was criticised for using felled century-old oaks and poplar trees from a wood (the fashion house claimed the trees were not 100 years old and promised to replant 100 new oak trees in the heart of the same forest...) to recreate inside Paris' Grand Palais a magic autumnal setting for its A/W 2018 runway show. It would be great if ethical and responsible fashion extended also to runway sets, with temporary structures like the ones by VTN Architects providing innovative decor, while giving impenitent fashionistas the chance to ponder more about the possibilities that natural materials can offer us.
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