Wind and Water Cafe is located in a rampant tropical landscape and is one of the earliest experiments to use bamboos in contemporary architecture expression.
The landscape, together with the artificial lake enclosing the building, plays an important role in realizing a comfortable environment in the cafe space. The roof of the building was made by joining a combination of bamboos and steel tensile members, providing voluminous space of maximum 12-meter width without columns. Its V-shape was generated according to CFD analysis, aimed at maximizing the wind flowing into the building.
Wind and Water Cafe consists of thousands of bamboos with minimum usage of steel components. With traditional processing methods of bamboos, such as soaking and smoking out, bamboos demonstrate their outstanding characteristics of aesthetic, durability, ecology and cost efficiency as housing materials.
Bamboo is the green material of the 21st century due to its excellent CO2 absorbability and higher rebirth ability of bamboo forest in comparison with other tropical forests. It is not only a decorative material but also plays an important role as a main structure.
Bamboo material has its own attributes such as: small and uneven dimensions and its high durability to bend. Because of those special characteristics, bamboos were used in the curving structure to maximize its potential and cultivate its grace of curvature, which is totally different from other wood materials.
With the limitation of length and dimensions of the material, bamboo structure becomes the composition of small pieces. As a consequence, numerous joints are unavoidable and its details become the essence in the bamboo structure. It is common to use metal joints; however, the organic characteristic and cost advantage for a bamboo structure is lost by using too many metal joints. Therefore, low-tech solutions were chosen (tying rope and using bamboo wedges) to make joints as the sleek transition of the body.
