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Edited by Enrique Martinez and Marco Steinberg
Department of Industrial Design, Rhode Island School of Design, USA 2000.
72 pp., illus.
ISBN: 00-911517-67-7.
Reviewed by Kevin Murray.
E-mail: kdmurray@bigpond.com


Material Legacies: Bamboo documents work done by students in the Rhode Island School of Design to capitalise on the potential of bamboo. Known as ïvegetable steelÍ, the bamboo plant is widely praised as an abundant source of strong building material. This book contains a record of the myriad combinations of processes through which bamboo can be reconstituted. A section titled The Dictionary of Actions lists 23 processes, from disgregating to laminating. These processes are divided into primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary, depending on their position of the chain of manufacture. The results are displayed in 129 photographs, which testify to the enormous range of material that bamboo can produce.

As such, the book is largely about promise. There is little mention of the particular uses that such reconstituted bamboo might have. The essay by Linda Garland and Will Hooker notes the legend of an Englishmen who gave up enumerating all the uses of bamboo, stating it couldnÍt be done in one lifetime. It is as though such uses are taken for granted. Yet it is difficult to appreciate the results of their research without considering how it might be useful. The proof of the pudding, and all that.

It would perhaps be too much to expect a modest book like this to cover all aspects of bamboo production. But if it is only to deal with the processes of making bamboo composites, then it might make more of the resulting substances as objects in their own right Ü as works of art.

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