Brian Erickson - The Bamboo Twister — Better Bamboo Buildings

Brian is a bamboo pioneer. He has trail blazed many bamboo journeys. His story is interesting, valid and necessary for us to know and appreciate in our own journeys forward with bamboo. Brian tells us of how he came to work in bamboo almost 35 years ago and also how he found a way to ‘twist’ bamboo.

Many thanks to Ewe Jin Low for inviting me to share my story with young bambuseros coming up. It´s a story based on inspiration, imagination, trust in luck and the kindness of strangers. There are so many people who have helped me over the years, but l can say right off, without my wife Patricia, I wouldn´t have found my way.

Not being an architect nor an industrial designer but an English major who makes furniture, it was natural I would come to bamboo through a book. In 1985 in Richmond, California, Patricia found ‘The Book of Bamboo’ by David Farrelly at the local library. Bringing it home that day led us down the bamboo path and all the way to Central America where we are today. Our motto became “Way will open.”

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Patricia and I were helping organize a construction brigade to Nicaragua when David the above book writer showed up on our doorstep in response to a letter from Patricia. He soon became a friend and pitched in to help coach our group, since he had lived for a time in that country while writing his book.

In 1986, after we spent six weeks in Nicaragua building simple brick houses on a cooperative near Esteli, Patricia for reasons of her own, felt we needed to leave California and move to Nicaragua. On the cooperative I had been exposed for the first time to a huge creaking clump of B.vulgaris and loved it. Back in Richmond I had been intrigued as a woodworker by the Phyllostachys hedge we inherited from the previous owner but I knew nothing about using it. After a year or so of arduous lobbying by Patricia, I agreed to move south if she could find a suitable project where we could work. It had to “speak” to me.

Luck kicked in with a phone call from David Farrelly on the very afternoon before her midnight flight to Guatemala. He, knowing nothing about this plan, was calling to read us a letter from Alan Bolt, a Nicaraguan of German descent. Alan was starting a rather wild-eyed (I say that in hindsight) bamboo project as part of the program of MACRU (Movimiento para la Animación de Culturas Rurales). Based on a coffee farm north of Matagalpa, La Praga, it was comprised of the theater group Nixtayolero, whose tours in the USA and Europe paid for the farm, a Diversified Agriculture Project, a women´s theater project, and bamboo.

During that phone call they agreed to meet up in Nicaragua in about six weeks to visit Alan Bolt together. When we hung up the phones that day, Patricia called out, “there´s our project!”

Six weeks later in Managua David was nowhere to be found, so she went hitch-hiking to Matagalpa and (kindness of strangers) a family picked her up. They ate mandarin oranges all the way there, they set her up in a hostel and helped her locate La Praga. After a two-hour visit with Alan, Patricia had a written agreement offering us no salary but instead a rustic place to live and work, with rice, beans and tortillas on our plates 3 times a day. I would bring my own tools and they would provide the bamboo.

Six months later we drove down from California with my tools and our dog Gordo packed in the back of the truck. Our dog was our goodwill ambassador at every border, because people were not used to seeing large dogs as docile pets. The trip was a breeze even in crossing Honduras where we had the company of an armed soldier from border to border. He made it easy as he routed our way (no maps, no signs, no GPS) and waved us through the many military checkpoints.

We arrived and quickly settled in at La Praga. Bamboo came from the east side of the mountains, a war zone with sporadic attacks by the Contras. The bridges were blown up so the trucks had to cool off to ford the rivers, but one way or another we got bamboo. It was a giant species, Guadua aculeata, which I found was too cumbersome to make furniture that would fit in the small rooms of the typical house there. So I began splitting it with a machete and then calibrating the strips with an improvised jig on the bandsaw that I had brought with me. Treatment was limited to an application of a diesel/mothball solution which was stinky but somewhat effective.

Around the farm several bamboo structures were built (not by me) but treatment by topical spraying of diesel or an insecticide definitely was not effective at scale, especially on round bamboo. This project was attempting to graft some of the ideas in David´s book onto the Nicaraguan mentality but with neither practical experience nor sufficient funding. Nicaragua was a country with abundant bamboo resources, especially the extensive Guadua forests on the Caribbean side. There was also a small village, Catarina near Masaya, dedicated to weaving with B.vulgaris, where David often lived while he was there. But our project was an ambitious undertaking in a wartime country where bamboo culture was virtually limited to basket-making. So, although I made some furniture and an architect erected a few buildings, the project was short-lived.

Even so, I feel a debt of gratitude to David. Perhaps his book, subtitled “A comprehensive guide to this remarkable plant, its uses, and its history,” would not be chosen by the more technically-oriented among us, but its flavorful mix of philosophy, poetry, ethnography and botany hooked me at first reading. To David I am grateful for his vision of a better, greener world tufted by bamboo: he got me to literally dig it, plant it and harvest it, all to explore its life-giving potential both in the ground and in the hand.

At present I have my bamboo workshop and plantation near Guapiles, Costa Rica. I came to Costa Rica from Nicaragua to study bamboo furniture-making with the Taiwanese Bamboo Technical Mission near Limon in 1989, planning to return to continue working with MACRU. At that moment the Contra War ended and everything changed, the Sandinistas and their projects were out. I stayed on in Costa Rica and eventually found work with the National Bamboo Project of Costa Rica, a social-interest housing project funded by the Netherlands and Costa Rica and overseen by the UNDP.

Costa Rica, a more modern culture on the southern border of Nicaragua, had even less of a bamboo tradition than its neighbor. But Arch. Ana Chaves Robles had written her thesis on low-cost bamboo houses based on the traditional experience of Colombia. Armed with a knack for wrangling funding, she eventually started up the National Bamboo Project of Costa Rica which in the 1990´s built 2400+ low-cost houses in the rural areas of Costa Rica. I was very fortunate to be put on the team, based only on my brief experience with guadua in Nicaragua and the furniture course I took at the Bamboo Mission. During that decade I not only enjoyed a rich collaboration with Arch. Ana Chaves Robles, Dr. Jorge Gutierrez, Eng. Guillermo Gonzalez, Eng. Arturo Venegas, and Eng. Francisco Rodriguez, but also with international consultants such as Dr. Walter Liese, Dr. Jules Janssen and Arch. Oscar Hidalgo. I am indebted to all of them.

In 1995 the NBP morphed into Funbambu, a quasi-NGO headed by the Minister of Housing and therefore subject to shifts in the political wind. In late 1998 Funbambu was the host of the International Bamboo Conference in San José with attendees from all over the world; then just a few months later it was closed down by a newly elected government with a more neoliberal bent.

Up to 1999 I had been a furniture prototype designer working alongside Funbambu´s large bamboo plantation near Guapiles, 155 ha of Guadua angustifolia y G.chacoensis. With the disappearance of my job, I hired a friend to design a new workshop of my own on the Rio Blanco Road using the same prefabricated panels produced by Funbambu to build its bamboo houses.

Panels w/wood frames & G.sagittatum, “caña brava”

Workshop w/trusses in place, then zinc, then stucco

Since I spent the previous decade learning about bamboo through the making of prototypes both in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, I continued to explore ways to work with bamboo in my own shop. Early on in Nicaragua I had opted to reduce the giant Guaduas to much more manageable (less voluminous!) strips of various widths, allowing me to make furniture that was smaller and lighter and also allowing a clearer path to modularity by utilizing a material with parallel sides and a planed backside.

Knockdown adjustable lounge chair w/guadua lattice…

I deliberately chose to work with bamboo using basic carpentry tools, plus hardware and materials available at the local hardware stores, thus limiting the inputs that had to be imported by the Project or by those who wanted to follow our lead. The bamboo saw I built in 1991 from plywood and wood I still use today along with hand drills, sanders, a drill press, a joiner/planer, a compressor, etc..

I also designed and built a pneumatic press for 122 x 244 cm sheets of lattice of variable layouts, again using only materials bought locally and using reinforced drainage hose for the compression tubes. The lattice produced soon became a basic raw material in my designs.

In the year 2000 I planted a varied collection of 30+ tropical bamboos behind the new shop and a few years later was using it to build my furniture as well as to propagate plants for sale. In his book David sketches out an “Experimental Bamboo Farm” which I believe was the seed of my custom bamboo workshop and plantation, though I soon gave a new twist to the word experimental.

One of my clumps of D.brandisii, a very exuberant giant bamboo from Asia, put up a new shoot that grew in a very tight and contorted way (possibly a virus), inspiring me to think that I might take advantage of the annual grand period of growth in bamboo by placing a form in the path of the emerging tip of the shoot, thus harnessing this great burst of energy and giving it another expression.

That´s the new twist. Old tires in all sizes are abundant the world over and are easy to adapt to form molds of elongated spirals or flatter “circle” spirals.

The pictures below show you how to make a basic tire mold so that you may be inspired to try it with your bamboos. Not all bamboos cooperate but many will adapt well to the technique. Guaduas and Bambusas will do well, whereas D.asper, G.atroviolacea and others may not. LOTS of room to experiment!

First you find an appropriate size tire for the bamboo you want to shape. The tire in these photos is from a Nissan truck, not a passenger car, so it´s a little heaver and stiffer. The force behind a young shoot of giant bamboo will surprise you, it´s enough to rip the tire´s sidewalls if the curve isn´t right.

Then using a disc grinder (I prefer the large one because the disc lasts longer), I cut the inner rim at 2” intervals on both sides, followed by ¼” holes with a drill in alternate tabs for sewing the tire in the desired position and to prevent the shoot from escaping.

Finally, you cut the tire through at one position from side to side in order to twist it into the shape you want. Use #16 galvanized wire In short lengths to begin sewing the sides together as tightly as possible all along the length. These ties also provide a place to anchor the tire where it is tied (again by wire) to a supporting cane, whether it´s a live one in the clump or a dry, harvested cane that fills the need.

It´s easiest to position the mold over a shoot in its first weeks while it´s close to the ground, though with a ladder and some muscle you can place it on a higher shoot as in the long spiral above.

Above all, it´s important not to touch or bump the tip of the shoot with the tire or your hands, it may die. The tip is full of water in soft and fragile tissues, so be careful. With luck, after a wait of 3 or more years, you´ll be able to harvest a beautiful curving culm!