Contribution of bamboo materials in architecture education towards sustainable community development

Bamboo is one of the natural resources that are easy to find in forests, villages, and riversides area of tropical countries like Indonesia. On the other hand, architecture education in Indonesia has not focused much on bamboo as the potential architectural design material. Whereas bamboo has many potencies for many elements in architecture design. Architecture education is a possible way to explore and develop bamboo as an architectural element and introduce its potencies to the local communities. This paper is the initial desk study of multiphase research on the contribution of bamboo materials in architecture education towards sustainable community development. The objective of this paper is to explain the gap in the vast research topics on bamboo in order to define further research on how architecture education pays attention to the significance of bamboo as a sustainable material. The result shows that research topics on bamboo material are vastly developed in some areas and on the contrary is rarely explored in other areas of research. Research in architecture education and its teaching strategies to elevate the comprehension of the students on the topic of sustainable materials such as bamboo is hardly found.


Introduction
Bamboo is a common and familiar building material for Indonesian people because it is easy to find and quite affordable compared to other materials. Bamboo thrives in many areas with high humidity, especially along the watershed area. In many traditional houses in Indonesia, the dominant use of bamboo resulted in a unique structure and formal expressions. Bamboo is also famous for household appliances and home decorations. It is indeed a popular material which has been used for generations in many regions.
Unfortunately, nowadays, the use of bamboo as a building material in vernacular houses is vastly being replaced by other materials such as concrete and steel. People begin to think of bamboo as a less practical, less modern, and less durable material compared to concrete and other fabricated materials. There is even an assumption that bamboo is merely a lower-middle-class material. It is indicated by the decreasing number of bamboo houses in the local communities. There is a popular assumption in the community that bamboo houses are categorized as unfit for habitation, and are only used for the poor [1].
On the other hand, even though in conceptual level architecture education seems to pay attention to the discourse of sustainable architecture, at an operational level, bamboo is often placed merely as one of the common building materials, among other materials. Not many courses or subjects in the architecture education that offer comprehensive knowledge about bamboo and explore possibilities to develop bamboo as the potential future building material. Even in architecture design studios as the core of architecture education, bamboo is rarely considered as the primary building material in the design briefs.
These phenomena are contrary to the sustainable concept of bamboo as environmentally friendly material. Bamboo is a material that can be harvested every year for countries like Indonesia. Unlike wood, which takes decades to collect once. Bamboo can be processed into various goods and, therefore, can generate labor-intensive work for the surrounding community. With the right process, bamboo can be used for various structural and architectural elements, both exterior and interior. With all of its potentials, the socialization of the benefits, as well as the management and preservation of bamboo, needs to be carried out continuously to the local communities as an effort to conserve nature and to achieve sustainable community development. In general, bamboo is merely discussed in certain subjects and is rarely stated as one of the main issues or specific courses in the curricula.
Therefore, architecture education should be one of the media to introduce bamboo to the community as a local material that is environmentally friendly, with excellent availability and high aesthetic quality. The use of bamboo in large enough quantities and over a long period will support sustainable community development. For this reason, architects with their architectural education background have many opportunities to popularize bamboo in a more developed design and technology to society. Efforts to reintroduce and simplify bamboo in the local community required architectural innovations based on architectural education and research. The architectural innovations of bamboo can be socialized to three stakeholders, namely to students through architecture education, to architects, lecturers, and researchers through architectural research, and to the local community through community services [2]. These three interrelated aspects are seen in figure 1. This paper is the result of desk research in the preliminary phase of mix-methods research on the contribution of bamboo materials in architecture education towards sustainable community development. It reviewed various studies on bamboo as the main topic of architectural research. There are many studies on bamboo as one of the potential materials that had been done before by architecture researchers. However, from this review, one can explain which aspects of bamboo that have been, and which aspects that have not been thoroughly examined and explored through architectural research. The results have also helped the researchers to determine significant elements of architecture education, i.e., understanding, ability and awareness, and the importance of these aspects to introduce bamboo to architecture students, which needs to be explored further in the next phase of this whole research.  Table 1 listed the study of bamboo material in architecture for the last decade, studies on, especially in the Indonesian context, are well developed in wide topic ranges and methods. The methods are range from a mere standard description of bamboo as a sustainable building material to the advanced experiments on specific aspects of bamboo as a potential building structure. The topics are range from bamboo as the sustainable and ecological material to its flexibility and affordability ( Figure.   Structural exploration and aesthetic characteristics of bamboo material are two dominant topics studied by many researchers. However, among those researchers, only a few that had their studies focused mainly on bamboo material, e.g. A. Maurina and A. Widyowijatnoko, with more than five publications within the recent years, especially on bamboo structural explorations. Within this range of topic, the development of bamboo technology as a deployable structure and its ability to obtain wide span buildings are the most attracting theme for the researchers [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Meanwhile, the studies on aesthetic characteristics of bamboo as building material were also conducted by other researchers [4,8,11,[13][14][15].

Studies on Bamboo Material in Architecture Research
Another popular topic is related to building environmental science, such as the characteristic of bamboo as green and ecological material [1,[15][16][17], including its ability to maintain thermal comfort [16,[18][19] as well as to keep optimum embodied energy in the buildings [20]. The use of bamboo as a building material such as laminated and plastered bamboo walls and their impacts on the building environments are the most studied theme in this range of topics.
On the other hand, the development of bamboo in architecture education is among the least topics studied by the researchers. An article written by Maurina and Prastyatama [2] is an exciting example of how three aspects of the higher education (i.e., teaching, researching, and serving the communities) can collaborate together to raise awareness and familiarity of the architecture students towards the unique characteristics of bamboo material as the structural, as well as non-structural elements of buildings. This article shows that research in architecture education and its teaching strategies to elevate the comprehension of the students on the topic of sustainable materials such as bamboo is a potential field of study. Many innovative ideas generated by the collaborations between the students and the lecturers/researchers resulted in the applicative designs relevant to the community [2].
Unfortunately, there are not many similar academic publications that documented and reported the impact of the exploration of bamboo projects within those three aspects of architecture education. Even though there are many related activities of the teaching, researching, and serving the communities, the documentations often ended up merely in the form of unpublished reports of research and community services. Furthermore, there is also a lack of further research on the positive and negative impacts of the activities implementations towards the community and the students as well as the lecturers themselves. Despite the lack of publications found, this topic's relevance to the environmental and social contemporary issues and their close relationship with architecture education make it important to reconsider this topic as one of the main research topics nowadays.
However, the positive impacts explained in Maurina and Prastyatama's article were only based on their observations of their students, fellow lecturers, and the community. Their research has not explored precisely which aspects of awareness, ability, and understanding were raised significantly through their collaborative activities. This is an opportunity for other researchers to determine the positive impacts more measurably. Therefore, the next phase of this research is to investigate the effects of architecture education on the awareness, understanding, and ability of architecture students related to bamboo explorations during college. Nine main topics that are frequently raised in architectural research will be used as a basis to arrange questions in each architecture education aspects. The further step of this research will be the investigations of the impacts of the architecture education towards the awareness of the community where the architecture students were conducting the academic projects.