RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Bamboo is an element frequently used in architecture. For example, it is used to build parquet floors, beams, ceilings, and fences. However, very few construction sites are encouraged to use it for the entirety of their construction. This fact did not prevent two friends from building a house entirely made of this material in the middle of the jungle.
The Youtube channel Primitive Survival Tool protagonists spend their videos building houses outdoors with natural elements. With the help of almost exclusively their hands, the whole process took them only fifteen days. The property is five meters wide and seven meters long and has 12 square meters.
To join the trunks together, they used thin plant stems as thread. The only tools they used were a chisel and tweezers to make the holes where the small, firm branches would go as nails to join the trunks with them.
These were embedded with other short logs they chose to implement as hammers. For the curved canes that make up the structure, they previously passed them through fire to soften them and to be able to bend them at their convenience. Then, they stacked most of them on top of each other to form the wall and reinforced it with a second external layer.
From the outside, the house’s front facade consists of a diamond-shaped bamboo lattice with two adjoining entrance doors and a window to let in light. All around, they used very thick logs to outline the edges of the house and hide the stack of stacked logs.
The house has two rooms and is furnished with a 1 x 1.20 m bed, a 1 x 0.50 m dining table, four chairs, and an armchair. The furniture was not bought later but was also made by their own hands. For the pool, they dug the hole with chisels, put in sturdy logs as beams, and with small reeds, they built the edge as a deck that surrounds it.
THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE
So far, you can see how they built an entire bamboo house in two weeks, including a swimming pool, an achievement that already has a lot of merit in itself. However, the duo doubled the bet and previously built a second underground floor underneath the reed house.
Chisel in hand, the friends dug and built a cave of clay-textured earth. In this space, they carved out a room that includes a bed with shelves sunk into its sidewalls and another room with an armchair and a table. Since it is underground, the light that enters through the stairs that they also carved or the spaces they left open to the sky does not reach the entire surface, so they decided to illuminate the room with candles.
The video has accumulated more than 75 million views, and the channel has 6.25 million subscribers from all over the world. These followers watch the architectural adventures of these friends who build houses in the middle of the jungle using natural elements.