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Exotic Bamboo House for the Architect’s Mother Wins International Prize

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This unique house designed by Benjamin Garcia Saxe to please his mother in Costa Rica makes unique use of bamboo to enhance cross-ventilation. But it actually pleases two mothers. Mother nature likes low impact design, too.

The house has won first prize in the private house category at this year’s World Architecture Festival held in Barcelona.

Guanacaste is a very humid tropical part of Costa Rica, and the house makes use of the bamboo to pull the prevailing wind right through the house to keep it cool. All of the “walls” are completely porous.

The effect from inside would feel like being in a forest, with the light baffled by the wooden cylinders. He named it “A Forest for A Moon Dazzler.”

Direct sunlight is kept out, but from inside you can see out easily, from within the  man-made bamboo grove created by the ‘forest’ of bamboo shoot tubes.

The bamboo screens are adjustable, like shutters, with a pivot mechanism that allows openness when desired.

Over 4,000 pieces of bamboo go into the construction, making this a very green built home, using almost only bamboo, that grows very fast – so it is the most sustainable material to build with.

The house is suspended above the ground for additional cooling.

Only the bedroom is a little more enclosed, with a screen behind the bamboo tubes, for a sense of enclosure and tranquility.

This super-innovative house is a great example of the kind of third world low carbon cooling innovation that pleases Mother Earth. And in the process, creating a very charming, peaceful and natural home like nothing we’ve ever seen.

It is also fortunate that the architect’s mother – the client – was open to trying an extremely experimental design – isn’t that what mothers are for!