A visit to Auroville Bamboo research Center

One of our interns from America was able to visit and meet several great centers around southern India that shared in the passion of bamboo. One great center was the bamboo research center at Auroville community located near Pondicherry, India. Auroville was started some 40+ years ago, and in that time they have made some really great structures, as well as innovations from bamboo. I had the pleasure of talking to one of the site workers, and even though my tamil was as good as his english we still were able to talk about bamboo and what each other has done. The articles and furniture was great quality, and some things we have not seen before. There was a great innovation of bamboo soap that had an amazingly fresh smell, and I'm sure it would feel great on the skin. The soap was made of powdered bamboo charcoal, and I assum mixed with oils, and other organic non-toxic cleaning chemicals.
As you can see in the picture below is the charcoal is kept in a barrel and heat is continually circulating through, so as not to ignite, but keep it warm enough to burn out all of the impurities. Something we at Wonder Grass feel is a great idea.
The American pavilion at Auroville also had a great structure that was a composite building with cement on the ground floor, and bamboo terrace-top with bamboo as it's reinforcement. This structure was a really good example how to use bamboo with other materials such as cement, and wood, as well as fiberglass and ferro-cement. The nice aesthetic feel of bamboo is that it is light-weight and makes a building structure seem graceful and attractive without weighing it down with heavy columns like cement structures do. It had a wonderful feel and
gave the occupant a nice view from all directions.
It is constantly a nice reminder that there are other people in the world and India that do great work and continually try to push into the serious building areas. Something that is not easy to do at all.
We hope to create an online directory or network primarily for people in India but also surrounding countries, so that progress, business, and implementation of bamboo can be sped up with more collaboration and cross communication between many fields, for example, college students to working designers who use bamboo. We hope to have that up and running in months time.