Super Steve/Super Bamboo

Back to the jungle (linear this is not): Super Steve and his wife (a Tica architect), have designed and built a bunch of fascinating, meticulously-crafted bamboo structures in the seaside jungle. Here’s what Steve told me about the bamboo he uses, imported from Columbia:

• It’s cut with machetes in the 1/2-waning moon — when the moon is on the opposite side of the earth, and it is drawing the sugars and starches out of the canes and into the roots. This is a 3-day window once a month.

• It’s cut between midnight and 4 AM.

• It’s left standing in the grove 30-90 days so moisture wicks out slowly; then it’s air dried in the sun.

• If it’s getting exported (like to Costa Rica, it’s immersed in a borate and boric acid solution (natural bug killer).

I have a bunch of photos of these wonderfully-constructed (and designed!) structures.

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

Leave a Reply