BAMBOO ARCHITECTURE: A PROPOSAL FOR IMPLEMENTATION IN BENIN CITY

ABSTRACT

Bamboo as a material for building construction was assessed for its sustainability using data from secondary sources. It is a well-known fact that a sustainable material for building construction must be environmentally friendly, affordable, flexible in usage, and durable, which makes bamboo one because of these characteristics it possesses. Also, due to its rapid growth and adaptability to most climatic conditions as well as its properties and superiority to most rapidly growing plant in Nigeria, bamboo emerges as a sustainable material for building construction in Nigeria. Bamboo has numerous unique advantages like the ability to grow fast with a high yield, environmental friendliness, lightness in weight, and matures quickly for harvesting. Additionally, bamboo can be grown abundantly at a lower cost than other building materials, which makes it more economical. Throughout the entire globe, there is increase in human population. As the number of humans in the world increases, there is proportional increase in the need for shelter and other civil infrastructures. This increase in need for shelter and other civil infrastructures has resulted in over- consumption of traditional building materials and has created serious burden on the depleting world’s natural resources. Continuous use of the traditional building materials like steel, timber, cement, has also led to increase in the burning of fossil fuels which releases greenhouse gases to the environment during their production. Nevertheless, traditional building materials are very expensive and their continuous use leads to increase in the overall cost of buildings and other civil infrastructures. The use of bamboo as a material for construction of buildings and other civil infrastructures presents a very huge relief to the aforementioned problems encountered in the construction industry.