The Blooming Bamboo Home is a housing solution for millions of Vietnamese people suffering from natural disasters such as storms, floods, landslides and drought. — File Photos

HA NOI (VNS) — A bamboo house designed by Viet Nam's H&P Architects was awarded a Highly Commended status in the House of the Year category at the World Architecture News (WAN) Awards 2014.

The Blooming Bamboo Home is a housing solution for millions of Vietnamese people suffering from natural disasters such as storms, floods, landslides and drought.

With bamboo modules of four to five centimetres in diameter and 3.3m or 6.6m in length, each house can be simply assembled with bolts, the bamboo bound together, hung and put in place. This structure is strong enough to withstand phenomena such as floodwaters that are up to 1.5m in height. The bamboo structure has multifunctional uses. It can be used as a house, and an educational, medical and community centre, and can be expanded, if necessary.

With a fixed bamboo frame, the roof of the house can be made according to the local climate and using locally available materials such as small bamboo, bamboo wattle, fibreboard or coconut leaves.

According to H&P Architects, the users can build the house themselves in 25 days. It can be mass produced with modules, and the total cost of the house is only US$2500.

Therefore, the house can provide warmth to people in the most severe conditions, help them control their activities in the future, and also remarkably contribute to ecological development as well as economic stabilisation.

Earlier this year, the Bamboo Blooming House won the International Architecture Award 2014, an annual prize awarded by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design in collaboration with the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

The winner in the House of the Year category at this year's WAN Awards was a house in Madrid designed by Estudio, Spain, while the shortlisted entries included The Garden House in London, the United Kingdom; Villa H36 in Stuttgart, Germany; and Narigua House, Monterrey, Mexico, as well as Nannup House in Perth, Australia.

The WAN Awards are the world's largest architectural awards programme with 1,379 entries, 317 international judges and 72 participating countries, as well as 55,000 Wan App users and 1,400,000 page views of worldarchitecturenews.com.

The other categories at the awards include Performing Spaces, Sustainable Building of the Year, Landscape and Adaptive Reuse. — VNS