Chiangmai Life Architects and Construction uses bamboo and clay earth as their primary building materials. The company strives to create spaces that have a negative carbon footprint while embodying modern and clean architecture.

Rapid population growth, fast-paced urbanisation and industrial transformation have driven material footprint growth—especially for construction materials, such as cement, to build new infrastructure in cities. The built environment and the construction sector are the biggest consumers of materials globally, contributing the most to local waste production. In order to satiate the material requirements of a growing, highly urbanised, population, the construction sector’s material footprint will only continue to increase. Moreover, the current trends in material consumption and energy are driving climate change, waste and resource depletion.

Decoupling the environmental impacts of material extraction and resource use with human well-being is crucial in the transition to a sustainable future. In the built environment, circular economy strategies for the construction sector need to be studied and implemented to reduce environmental stresses. By using natural materials for building construction—bamboo, rammed earth, adobe bricks, and wattle and daub walls, among others—Chiangmai Life Architects and Construction wants to lead by example through sustainable architecture. Bamboo and clay earth are their primary building materials when creating spaces such as homes, offices, factory spaces, schools, eco-resorts, villas and community areas that reflect a sense of wellbeing and creativity with attention to the tropical climate in Thailand. Bamboo and clay earth are low-carbon intensive materials, and the company strives to create spaces that could potentially have a negative carbon footprint while embodying modern and clean architecture in form. Bamboo has several advantages as a construction material: lightweight, high tensile strength, but also flexible and a quickly renewable natural resource. Rammed earth, on the other hand, is a material suitable for sustainable living. It has a long shelf-life and a high thermal mass, which protects spaces from excessive heat or cold. Wattle and daub walls have a low carbon footprint and provide good thermal and sound insulation. 

The carbon intensity and energy use of buildings is massive: more than a third of energy used on the planet is consumed by buildings and, in many countries, also the biggest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Use of alternate and environmentally sustainable building materials, such as bamboo and rammed earth, among others, can lower the amount of carbon embodied in buildings. Rammed earth, for instance, has the lowest carbon footprint among all building materials. It is affordable, highly recyclable, renewable and very accessible. Given that it’s locally available everywhere, rammed earth has little to no transport-related emissions. Most importantly, rammed earth-based homes reduce the embodied energy from the construction, operation and disposal phases of buildings.

Bamboo too has several environmental and practical benefits. It’s a fast renewable resource and with mechanical properties akin to timber. Given bamboo’s faster growth rate and harvest cycles, bamboo forests embody nearly four times the carbon density per hectare than that of spruce forests. Additionally, bamboo’s capacity to heal watersheds during extreme heat events and flood mitigation is noteworthy. Just a hectare of bamboo functions similarly to a 5,000 litre water holding tank in topsoil. In terms of biomass, bamboo as a crop has more raw material output (around 10–30% annually) as opposed to 5% for regular trees in the region. Therefore, it supplies farmers with more raw material to help their local communities introduce this low-impact building material in local markets and promote ecologically and economically sustainable business at the village level.

Photo by Paulina Sáez on Unsplash.