Buildings in use or in the course of erection are the largest sources of carbon emission and account for over 50% of the total world emission. There is growing need to look for a healthier and sustainable alternative to the conventional building practices.

One such construction material that has come to the forefront in recent years in India is Bamboo. Bamboo is capable of providing structural integrity to a building. It is good in tension and is earthquake resistant. Bamboo is straight, hollow, smooth and light yet hard and strong. It is pliable and flexible which can be easily bent or split; yet it can be as strong as mild steel. It grows more rapidly than trees and starts to yield within three or four years of planting. If it takes 60 years for a tree to grow 60 feet, bamboo can grow as tall in 60 days. More over it is native to India, it being the second largest resource for bamboo in the world.

Despite the historical prominence of bamboo however, the productivity using this material is remarkably low. This is owed to limited and disappearing knowledge, lack of skills and basic tools, and the negative social connotation of being ‘temporary’ and ‘low-class’ associated with these materials.

Architecture Brio attempts to reinvestigate the traditional natural materials so that they can be re-appropriated to cater to the modern requirements. The building for NGO Magic Bus is an integration of design, structure, technique and use of materials with the location, the environment, the user and the socio-cultural context. In this so-called "green building" Architecture BRIO experiments with Bamboo composite construction methods.

In this project a clearly defined material concept using bamboo for columns and walls. The columns consist of two bamboos, joined together by steel strips. Trusses made of pre-cast concrete and steel tension cables span between the columns. The floors are made of half cut bamboo, on which a layer of 50 mm concrete is laid. Walls are infill panels made of split bamboo covered with reinforced plastered on the inside. This provides the advantage of thermal insulation offered by the hollow cavity of bamboo and additional carpet area because of reduced wall thickness.

The selection of materials and building methods is optimized to decrease the load on the building, which in turn allow the supporting columns to be sleek and elegantly dimensioned. This choice of construction technique has resulted in several advantages. The entire dead weight of the building has been reduced to almost 1/3rd of a similar building done with conventional RCC slabs and masonry walls. This has helped in bringing down the cement and steel consumption by almost 70%.

Combining natural and local materials, with state of the art technologies and materials such as wood, concrete and steel, this building portrays a new construction idiom – an expression of contemporary sustainable architecture.