Designing a Two-Storey Bamboo Villa
Meet Christian Walker, a designer, and founder of the Neo Design Studio. As he shares his journey taking the bamboo online course and how it helped him to bring his vision of the bamboo villa to life.
My name is Christian Walker. I am a designer, creator, entrepreneur and founder of the Neo Design Studio, based in Switzerland. The studio specializes in the design and creation of places of natural beauty, built with pure organic materials according to universal laws of nature. Our current focus is the design and creation of the Neo Campus.
The Campus will be built in Switzerland. It’s a place that draws like-minded individuals and companies who are seeking a more sustainable, authentic, fulfilling way of living and heart-centered creations and offers a wide range of indoor and outdoor experiences. The Neo Campus is a place of spectacular beauty, for people to enjoy, relax, rejuvenate, create and celebrate. The campus with its breathtaking landscape includes a collection of spectacular buildings. Everyone is a unique, inspiring, expanding and unforgettable experience and designed by our Design Studio.
I remember the moment when I came across the Green Village in Bali for the first time in 2019. I was totally fascinated by the breathtaking architecture of the buildings made with bamboo and the concept of the village, because it covered many aspects of my vision of the new way of living and working together.
Since then, I have never let go of this fascination and the possibilities that building with bamboo offers. When I came across the Bamboo Online Course at the beginning of this year, I knew that this course would give me the tools I needed to implement Neo Campus with its organic forms here in Switzerland. Although we plan to build the Campus here in Switzerland mainly using wood, clay and stone, we will build all our models using mainly bamboo, and we will try to use bamboo as a building material where it makes sense.
The whole course and especially the model making part helped me to bring my vision of the cosmic flower villa with its unique shapes to life. The creation of the model was an impressive and expanding experience as the design developed during the making of it. It was a very natural process and the most precious gift for me was to experience how the ideas went from intuition, through my heart straight into my hands. It is impressive to see how the model has continued to develop over the months and how more and more details have been added over time.
From Concept to Final Structural Model
My initial idea was to design a round-shaped house where people would constantly feel the pulse of mother earth and the pulsating life force of nature. My vision was to have a roof shape, which is inspired by the shape of the leaves of the flower Lupinus Polyphyllus.
So I started with the first sketches, then created the first concept models until I finally got to the very basic final model of the villa. After the completion of the course, it took several months to work out the details of the design. Now the final structural model is completed.
The main structural system we used is the hyperbolic tower and the final model of the villa has two floors, where the hyperbolic tower in the center creates the main design element, as well as the roof shape and its details.
The structure of the Villa will be built mainly with wood, clay, and stone, because these are the materials that we want to use to build the Villa and bamboo is not readily available here in Switzerland.
This course was an incredible source of inspiration for my project, and I finally got all the tools for my vision of the Campus, being built with mainly organic materials and organic shapes, to come true. Module 9 with Elora Hardy was the most inspiring part for me.
An important thing I learnt during the course and during the creation of the model was how this whole creation process is an evolutionary process. It still amazes me every day how things started to evolve out of nothing once I began to work on the model. Bamboo is such a fantastic organic and flexible material, which makes every shape and every idea possible. This is what I love the most about bamboo.
The process was a constant dance and communication between the creation and the bamboo, or a communication with nature if you will.
June 7-18, 2024
The 11 Day Bamboo Build & Design Course in Bali
In 11 days, we'll show you how to build bamboo structures we’ll share all that it takes to build with nature.
