Elora Hardy

It’s like an Avatar world, but very real. In the jungle of Bali, Indonesia, there is a spectacularly futuristic six-storey mansion made almost exclusively from a single sustainable material. And the most amazing thing is that this is just one example of what Elora Hardy has done over the years. The Canadian designer, who spent her childhood in this country among scarecrows and coconut shells, designed castles that she now builds like authentic works of art. Before that, she worked as a print designer for prestigious brand Donna Karan, in New York. A life that was left behind when she launched her architecture practice in Bali, which she called Ibuku, known for creating unique buildings out of bamboo.

What led you to graduate in fine arts?
I love beauty! Especially the beauty of nature and culture that surrounded me growing up in Bali. Actually, I later realised that I had confused fine arts with craftsmanship and design, as the distinction is traditionally different in the East and the West. But regardless, studying fine arts meant learning to draw, which means learning to see, and studying art history meant learning to think and make meaning in context, which meant learning to question and think in context. 

What made you leave the fashion industry (working for Donna Karan in particular) and return to Bali and found Ibuku?
As I got farther into my 20’s I felt an increasing need to work toward an optimistic and beautiful future. As a maker, that meant making with sustainable materials, something that I couldn’t find a way to do in the fashion world that I was in at that time. Back home in Bali, I saw that my dad John and stepmom Cynthia Hardy, who were always up to big things, had been building a school — the Green School. To live up the name, they chose bamboo, and what caught my heart was the wonder and excitement I felt at the way their team had designed the spaces. After the campus was built, that team needed opportunities to continue designing and building. Even though I had no architectural, construction, or business training, I felt I had to find a way to keep that project moving forward, and that new art form going. If I didn’t find a way to utilise the connections and resources and safety net that I had, and devote my skills towards sustainability, then how could I imagine anyone else would?

Where does this ecological ‘mission’ come from that moves you to work in sustainable design?
People need nature, to feel and remember that they are part of it. If we can create spaces that feel more like a forest or a cocoon than a building, then we feel that we have succeeded in reconnecting something vital. Beauty only matters if it brings each moment toward a future that we want to be in. Primarily, the inspiration for Ibuku’s structures comes from the feeling of being a human in the landscape, and from listening to the materials. Ibuku spaces want to help us feel sheltered within, not separated from, nature. Because humans do need shelter, architecture itself has evolved as a way to over-protect us and shut us off from the natural world. When our need for shelter is well balanced with the experience of being immersed in friendly nature, we have the opportunity to really feel like we belong where we are. 

What does Ibuku mean to you and what is the main goal of this company?
At Ibuku we are designing with natural and innovative materials to create spaces that bring us closer to how we want to live in the world. After a decade of evolving an entirely unique vocabulary for one material, bamboo, people began inviting us to bring our way of designing into other materials, so now we create homes, campuses, hospitality and wellness spaces, internationally. In each place, we bring our original perspective to weave into a collaboration with local experts and international innovators. We are always listening for how the landscape wants to come to rest, what the materials want to express, and of course how people can belong there in a good way. We believe we can create places where we can rediscover nature in ourselves, and feel a sense of belonging and delight.

"Ibuku spaces want to help us feel sheltered within, not separated from, nature”

What is the most important work so far and why?
It’s been amazing to see how Ibuku’s work has helped shift the idea of ‘sustainable’ design, and bamboo design especially, from the practical and obligatory toward the playful and elegant. A decade ago, bamboo was beginning to spark the imagination among a few pockets of innovators, but most of the world, if they thought of it at all, considered it a poor man’s timber, perhaps a potential eco-solution. Today bamboo is a proud and dynamic material in its own right, worthy of study and creative attention, attracting designers and engineers, who are open to new ways of thinking. We share what we are learning through online and in-person workshops, called Bamboo U, which also builds our international community. What bamboo has taught us in the studio is simply flexibility: that we are not necessarily at the centre of the universe. That there is richness and wonder to be had when we shift our own perspectives and see things in a new light.The spaces and structures we create soothe the hearts and spark the imaginations of the people spend their days there. They ground them in the natural world, and give them hope for the future. The spaces themselves are designed to inspire brilliant thoughts. What they are built from and how we consciously or subconsciously relate to that material strongly influences our emotional reaction. There’s a sense that if we, a small team designing in the jungle over the course of just a few years have been able to create castles out of grass, then what else is possible? I want people to realise and remember that a wonderful future is possible, and that it’s in our hands to create it. When people step into The Arc, or Sharma Springs for the first time, their eyes gaze high up, they lean back and their shoulders relax, and they light up with a sense of wonder. Spaces that provoke feeling capture people’s hearts, and motivate action. 

In your opinion, could bamboo change the world?
Bamboo is the most elegant, efficient, fastest and abundantly growing material around. The rainforest is almost gone, plywood is mostly made from the rainforest and cement has a carbon load that the future can’t tolerate. Though building with bamboo is not new, engineers, architects and designers like us are able to invest the time and care in creating a new design vocabulary with bamboo, because natural treatment methods have turned bamboo into a credible, long lasting building material.

"Natural treatment methods have turned bamboo into a credible, long lasting building material”

How many bamboo works have you "designed”? 
Though we now work with many materials, our first 200, or so, structures over our first 12 years as a practice were primarily built from bamboo. How we design at Ibuku grew out of the choice to use bamboo. In the absence of what you could call a tried-and-true vocabulary or even precedent of bamboo architecture, we had to invent our own rules, our own processes, our own systems. We learned to listen to the material and understand what the material wants to become in the world. Rather than aspiring for rare or scarce materials, bamboo lets us share and celebrate abundance.

Have you ever thought about taking an architecture course?
I love to study, and am constantly learning. We often wish we had a curriculum to guide us – but instead we must be the explorers, the adventurers. I would love to complement that with architectural study. I wonder how to do that while running a practice! I suspect that because I already work with talented qualified architects, I would be more tempted to formally study what I’ve been casually reading about: anthropology of home, the psychology of space, and how DNA is revealing human migration patterns that influence the identity of belonging.