Fashionable Grass?

Over the last five years or so, there has been a dramatic surge in bamboos popularity in America.   The versatile grass has over 1,400 species and can be fashioned into everything from extra soft pillows and sheets to hardwood floors and lawn furniture.  But what distinguishes it from  traditional wood is it’s exceptionally fast germination cycle.  A well-maintained crop of bamboo can reproduce itself in just a few years and requires substantially less water.

However, despite all of bamboos environmentally friendly attributes, some believe that it has become fashionable specifically because it doesn’t have such a “Green” appearance.

Instead of highlighting the stalks or other visual bamboo-ness cues, recent manufacturing technologies make it possible to minimize them.

David Bergman, a New York architect and the founder of Fire and Water Lighting specializes in projects that are both eco-friendly as well as stylish.  He believes that bamboos capability to blend in with ‘regular materials’ has directly led to the bamboos fashionability.   

While it’s old news that hemp can replace just about any wood or petroleum based product, it’s “hippy-eco-green” connotations have hindered it’s expansion into mainstream production.  Bergman refers to the recent duality in bamboo products as being:

Transparent green, meaning design that’s ecologically sound but doesn’t show off     that fact — avoiding the “granola look…”

Bamboo has the vague aura of being green-friendly but not too crunchy — trendy, in other words. Bamboo has become so well known, in fact, that Bergman, the architect, sometimes steers clients away from it. “I’ve had one or two instances,” he says, “where we’ve said, ‘It’s too done now.’ You don’t want to do something so of-the-moment that it dates the design.”

New York Times: High on Grass