Green School Bali: The Bamboo Architecture That Changed Everything — And What I Learned Being Part of It
By Willian Gonzalez | Founder, Bamboonaut · Sustainable Bamboo Architecture in Bali
If there is a single place on Earth that has done more to prove what bamboo construction can be — not just as a material, but as an architectural language, a philosophical statement, and a commercial proposition — it is a 20-hectare campus in the jungle outside Ubud.
The Green School Bali has been operating since 2008. In that time, it has become one of the most photographed, most written about, and most visited architectural destinations in Southeast Asia. Its bamboo structures have appeared in Architectural Digest, Vogue, Wallpaper, and hundreds of international publications. Its design studio, IBUKU, has built over 60 bamboo structures in Bali and exported its approach around the region.
I know this not only because I have studied it from the outside, but because in 2020 I was part of it — contributing to the architectural design of The Arc, the Green School's most ambitious structure and arguably the most technically significant bamboo building in the world.
That experience changed how I think about bamboo, about design, and ultimately about why Bamboonaut exists. This article is both an account of the Green School's architectural legacy and a firsthand perspective on what it means to work inside one of the world's most demanding bamboo construction projects.
Origins: A Vision for Sustainable Education and Architecture
The Green School was founded by John and Cynthia Hardy in 2006, opened in 2008, and is located approximately 30 minutes outside central Ubud, in a jungle setting along the Ayung River. John Hardy, a jeweler-turned-environmentalist, wanted to create a school that not only taught sustainability but embodied it — a campus built from sustainable materials that would demonstrate, visually and structurally, what conscious construction looked like.
The choice of bamboo was deliberate and visionary. At the time, bamboo construction in Bali was associated primarily with traditional agricultural structures — functional but unambitious. The Hardys wanted to show that bamboo could be the primary structural material for a complete, ambitious architectural program.
The founding vision also generated two directly related enterprises: the Meranggi Foundation, which develops bamboo plantations and presents bamboo seedlings to local rice farmers as a sustainable livelihood crop; and PT Bambu (later evolved into IBUKU), a design and construction company that promotes bamboo as a primary building material in an effort to avoid further depletion of tropical rainforests.
These weren't incidental — they reflected complete systems thinking about bamboo: grow it sustainably, treat it properly, design with it ambitiously, and prove that it works economically. It was this integration of ecology, craft, engineering, and design ambition that made the Green School not just a building project, but a proof of concept for an entire approach to construction.
IBUKU: The Design Studio That Defined Modern Bamboo Architecture
The architectural identity of the Green School is largely the work of IBUKU, the design studio led by Elora Hardy — John and Cynthia Hardy's daughter. Elora studied design at the Rhode Island School of Design and returned to Bali to build, with her team of architects, engineers, and craftspeople, what would become one of the most distinctive architectural practices in Asia.
IBUKU defines itself as "a team of young designers, architects and engineers exploring groundbreaking ways of using bamboo to build homes, hotels, schools, and event spaces in Bali, Indonesia — creating a new design vocabulary based on this one material and exploring the way sustainable architecture and design can redefine luxury."
That phrase — redefining luxury — is important. IBUKU's contribution to bamboo architecture was not simply demonstrating that bamboo could be structural. It was demonstrating that bamboo could be beautiful in ways that glass and concrete cannot — and that this beauty could command premium positioning in the market.
Completed key projects beyond the Green School include Green Village (a collection of luxury bamboo villas), Sharma Springs (a seven-story bamboo home that has become one of the most shared architectural images in Southeast Asia), and the Bambu Indah Hotel — all of which have appeared in international luxury publications and all of which have demonstrated that bamboo's market appeal extends well beyond sustainability-focused niche audiences.
The Architecture: What Makes the Green School Structures Extraordinary
Walking through the Green School campus is an experience that design professionals describe in terms usually reserved for major cultural buildings. The structures are dramatic, organic, and technically sophisticated — and they are made almost entirely from treated bamboo poles, lashing, and natural roofing materials.
The Heart of School — The Founding Vision
The original main school building, known as the Heart of School, established the design language that would define the campus. A flowing, multi-level structure with curved bamboo walls, high open ceilings, and a roofline that responds to the natural topography of its river-adjacent site. This building proved, from the outset, that bamboo could create enclosure, structural integrity, and spatial drama simultaneously.
The learning from early construction was iterative — architects discovered the value of deep roof overhangs (essential for protecting bamboo from tropical rain exposure), developed bamboo capping techniques to prevent moisture ingress at cut ends, and refined joinery methods that combined traditional Balinese craftsmanship with modern engineering precision.
The Arc — The Structure That Changed the Conversation
The Arc is the Green School's most ambitious structure, and the one I know most intimately.
I joined the architectural design team working on The Arc in 2020. At that point, the project had already gone through months of structural research and conceptual development. IBUKU was working in collaboration with Atelier One for structural engineering and with bamboo specialist Jörg Stamm for conceptual design — a multidisciplinary team in which precision engineering and craft intuition had to speak the same language.
My role was in the architectural and conceptual design work — contributing to the development of spatial and formal decisions within the structure's demanding engineering constraints. Working inside The Arc's design process was unlike any other architectural experience I've had. Bamboo does not behave like concrete or steel. Its properties are directional, variable, and deeply tied to the specific culm — the individual pole — in ways that require constant dialogue between the drawing and the material. Every design decision had to be tested against what bamboo could actually do, not what a homogeneous industrial material would allow.
The structure itself is extraordinary. The Arc is built from a series of intersecting 14-meter tall bamboo arches spanning 19 meters, interconnected by anticlastic gridshells — structural surfaces that derive their strength from curving simultaneously in two opposite directions. The design concept emerged from the observation of a mammal's ribcage: long compression arches held in place by tensioned membranes analogous to tendons and muscles between ribs. In The Arc, bamboo splits transfer forces from arch to arch in a structural system that is simultaneously functional, elegant, and biomimetic.
In the words of IBUKU creative director Elora Hardy: "The Arc at Green School Bali enters a new era for organic architecture, with its 19-meter span arches, interconnected by anticlastic gridshells."
Being inside the design process for a structure like this is not a neutral experience. It challenges every assumption you carry about what architecture can be, what materials can do, and what the relationship between ecology and built form actually looks like in practice. Working with IBUKU, with Atelier One, and with Jörg Stamm's structural intuition — in a project where the engineering requirements were genuinely unprecedented — was an education that no classroom could have provided.
What The Arc proved, definitively, was that bamboo is not limited to modest residential or hospitality structures. In the hands of skilled engineers and architects, it can achieve monumental scale, sophisticated structural performance, and aesthetic qualities that have no equivalent in conventional construction materials.
What Working on The Arc Taught Me — And Why It Matters for Bamboonaut
The experience of contributing to The Arc's architectural design in 2020 is inseparable from what Bamboonaut is today. Not because the projects are equivalent in scale — they're not, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise — but because working at that level of complexity with bamboo fundamentally reshapes how you approach every subsequent project, regardless of size.
Several things became clear to me through that process that I carry into every Bamboonaut project:
Bamboo demands honesty. Unlike concrete or steel, which can compensate for design imprecision through mass and uniformity, bamboo exposes every decision. A poorly designed joint fails. A structural form that doesn't respect the material's directional properties creates problems that no amount of skilled craftsmanship can fully correct. Working within IBUKU's design culture — where this honesty was built into every process — taught me to design with the material rather than applying it as a surface to a predetermined form.
The design process and the construction process cannot be separated. In conventional construction, the gap between architectural drawing and site reality is managed through tolerances and substitutions. In bamboo construction at The Arc's level, this gap is essentially closed. The craftsmen building the structure were part of the design conversation. Material selection affected form. The sequence of assembly informed the design of connections. I carry this integration into Bamboonaut's approach — our design process always includes the builders, and our construction process always includes the designers.
Scale is not the barrier. Precision is. The Arc's 19-meter spans are not possible because someone found a way to make bamboo bigger. They are possible because the engineering and design team achieved extraordinary precision in their understanding of the material's behavior, the loads being placed on it, and the connections that transfer those loads. The lesson for smaller projects is the same: the limiting factor in bamboo construction is almost never the material. It is the precision of the design and engineering that shapes it.
Working with the best raises your floor permanently. Having been part of a design process led by IBUKU, in collaboration with Atelier One and Jörg Stamm, means that I understand what high-standard bamboo design looks like from the inside. That understanding informs the minimum I will accept on any Bamboonaut project — in treatment protocols, in connection detailing, in the quality of engineering documentation, in the honesty of what we tell clients about what bamboo can and cannot do.
What the Green School Has Proven for Bali Builders
For anyone considering bamboo construction in Bali — whether for a villa, a boutique hotel, a yoga retreat, or a larger development — the Green School's 17-year track record provides several important proofs of concept that go beyond inspiration:
Longevity in the tropical climate. The Green School's original structures, built from 2007 onwards, have now stood for 17–18 years in Bali's tropical climate — high humidity, regular heavy rainfall, temperature extremes, and seismic activity. Bamboo built to a proper standard is a 25+ year material in this environment. This is not theory. It is observable reality on a campus that thousands of visitors walk through every year.
The premium market will pay for bamboo design. Green Village, Sharma Springs, and Bambu Indah Hotel have all demonstrated that the luxury market actively seeks bamboo architecture and will pay a significant premium for it. Sharma Springs attracts global media coverage years after completion simply because nothing built from concrete or glass creates the same visual impression. This is the same market dynamic that makes bamboo villas outperform equivalent concrete properties in Bali's short-term rental market.
Bamboo construction supports an entire ecosystem. The Green School has trained thousands of builders, architects, and craftspeople through its affiliated Bamboo U program — run by Orin Hardy — covering bamboo selection, treatment, building design, modelling, and on-site fabrication. This training ecosystem has built a cohort of skilled bamboo builders in Bali that supports the entire industry, including the builders Bamboonaut works with on every project.
Bamboo can meet rigorous engineering standards. The structural engineering work done for The Arc demonstrated that bamboo can be integrated into a fully professional engineering process: structural calculations, load testing, connection testing, seismic analysis, and construction documentation to international standards. I saw this process from the inside. It is exacting, demanding, and entirely achievable. This precedent makes it easier for contemporary bamboo builders — including Bamboonaut — to obtain structural engineering sign-off for permit applications, because the engineering community's understanding of bamboo structural behavior has been validated at scale, in the open, on a globally visible campus.
Design Principles From the Green School That Apply to Every Bamboo Build
Several architectural and construction principles established or refined through the Green School's buildings — including lessons I absorbed directly through The Arc — apply to any bamboo construction project in Bali:
Deep roof overhangs are not optional. Bamboo's primary vulnerability in a tropical climate is sustained moisture exposure at cut ends, joints, and low-lying members near the ground. Generous overhangs protect these points and dramatically extend structural life.
Bamboo capping prevents moisture ingress. Exposed cut ends of bamboo poles absorb moisture and become vulnerable to insect attack. Traditional Balinese capping techniques — and modern equivalents using epoxy fills and protective coatings — are straightforward to implement and significantly extend longevity.
Foundation-level concrete is both appropriate and structurally sound. Even the most committed bamboo architects in Bali use concrete foundations and ground-level elements where underground moisture resistance is required. This is not a compromise — it is a materially appropriate hybrid approach, and it is what The Arc uses at its structural termination points.
Joinery is where craftsmanship lives. The quality of connections between bamboo poles determines both the structural performance and the aesthetic quality of a bamboo building. IBUKU's evolution from simple lashing to sophisticated hardware-assisted connections with traditional craft execution demonstrates how joinery technique matures with experience. At The Arc, this maturity reached a level of detail that influenced how I approach every connection in every project since.
The bamboo species determines the structural outcome. The Green School's building program uses Dendrocalamus asper (petung bamboo) as its primary structural species — the same species Bamboonaut specifies for structural work. Petung's combination of large diameter, thick culm walls, and strong mechanical properties makes it the appropriate choice for structural applications in Bali.
The Bamboonaut Connection
Bamboonaut exists, in part, because of The Arc.
Not because I built The Arc — the credit for that extraordinary structure belongs to IBUKU, to Elora Hardy's creative vision, to Atelier One's engineering, and to Jörg Stamm's material mastery, to the Balinese craftspeople who bent bamboo into unprecedented shapes, and to the Green School's founding commitment to proving what sustainable construction could be.
But because being part of its architectural design process in 2020 made clear to me that bamboo construction at the highest standard is not a niche or a compromise. It is the appropriate architecture for Bali's climate, its seismic reality, its ecological context, and its market. And that the knowledge to do it well — not just passably, but with genuine structural integrity and design ambition — was exactly what Bali's growing community of villa investors, hospitality developers, and owner-builders needed access to.
That is what Bamboonaut offers: bamboo construction that carries the principles, the precision, and the material honesty that I first encountered at The Arc, applied to the scale of the villas, boutique hotels, and retreats that define Bali's investment landscape.
The Green School proved it could be done. We are building it, one project at a time.
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Tags: Green School Bali bamboo architecture, The Arc IBUKU design, bamboo construction Bali, Willian Gonzalez bamboo architect Bali, sustainable architecture Bali, bamboo villa design inspiration, IBUKU bamboo Bali