The Ace Team joins John Hardy on a tour of the Green School, his off-the-grid school in Bali that teaches kids how to build, garden, create and live in everything about bamboo.
Traverse a pedestrian bridge constructed entirely out of bamboo towards the heart of the school. Green School has be deemed the world’s largest freestanding bamboo building.
Green School was awarded the 2012 “Greenest School on Earth” award by the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council. The school was a finalist for the 2010 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
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Though Bali Green School is a private and international pre-kindergarten to high school, visitors are welcomed on site beside the Ayung River near Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. Located 15 minutes south of Ubud, a town historically rich in the arts that was featured in Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel Eat Pray Love, the Green School, with classes from the nursery-school level to Grade 10, combines standard International Baccalaureate programs with green studies such as carbon-footprint analysis and organic farming. The school is bound by ecologically-sustainability and focus on environmental education for young students.
The school was founded by John and Cynthia Hardy in September 2008 with 98 students. The Hardys reportedly conceived of Green School in 2006 after reading Alan Wagstaff’s Three Springs concept document for an educational village community, but have also attributed the inspiration to the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. There’s instruction in batik and traditional bamboo construction as well as Balinese mud wrestling. The overarching mandate, though, is to unleash four kinds of intelligence in such a way to appeal both to girls and boys: cerebral (IQ), physical (KQ), emotional (EQ) and spiritual (SQ).
By 2010, the school had 245 students and 2011 initial enrolment was over 300. Most of its students are foreigners— in 2012 Indonesians made up only 20% of the intake. In 2014, enrolment had increased to 400 students, only 15% of them Indonesian, with 34 on scholarships.
About 20 per cent of the approximately 200 students are local Balinese – the Green School foundation covers the private tuition fees – while other students come from around the world. What draws them to the bamboo school is a chance to learn that the world is not indestructible; that there are honourable ways to go about living lightly on it. Those are educational basics being planted elsewhere around the world, to be sure, including within many Canadian schools.
The great difference here has to do with the expressive, authentic architecture of the Green School complex. Where rammed-earth benches create a sunken, elliptical pit for sleek study desks, the design is reminiscent of mid-century modern. Instead of Danish teak or rosewood, everything – even the desks – is made of bamboo. There are no walls, just openings for the breezes that expand or contract depending on the curves or dramatic angles of the big, protective roofs.
Green School host told GoPro Ace, while the production of cement requires massive amounts of heat-generating energy, bamboo, technically a grass, grows fast and can release 35 per cent more oxygen into the air than trees. In South East Asia, bamboo is used as scaffolding. Hardy wanted to showcase bamboo’s inherent beauty and strength: In what’s called Heart of School, built for an estimated $225,000, high drama is delivered when the building’s structural columns rise up to create three interconnecting spirals within the jungle.
The school’s buildings were initially conceived by an architect as a static series of boxes set alongside the river. According to John Hardy, he categorically rejected that concept, finding it reminiscent of his own awful time in Canadian elementary school; you’ll find no mention of any architect of record. What he wanted was architecture in motion, not something static.
John Hard as seen in TED
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