Bamboo scaffolding

It is used in Hong Kong and in China.

Bamboo scaffolding on new residential towers in Hong Kong.

Bamboo scaffolding offers many advantages. It is very light, reusable and, unlike steel, it will bend some before it breaks. It has an excellent strength-to-weight ratio and it's half the weight and price of steel.

You can see three workers installing bamboo scaffolding on the downtown commercial building to the right of the Pizza Hut restaurant.

These two workers are installing bamboo along the front of this office building. The blue-black pieces that are hanging off their belts are the nylon pieces that they use to lash the bamboo poles together.

Time is important in Hong Kong, and bamboo scaffolding is six times faster to put up and 12 times faster to take down than steel scaffolds.

The installers (called spiders) are highly skilled and the work is dangerous.

I noticed that these two workers were wearing safety harness. I also noticed that the harness was only for show as they were not hooked up to anything.

The poles are tied together with pieces of nylon. They wrap them round a joint six times, really tight. Then they twist the ends of the tie around each other and tuck the twist into the gap between the poles.

They do not use any knots, metal screws or fasteners.

Down the street, I saw a commercial building where the scaffolding was complete.

You can see the black nylon strips that hold the bamboo poles together.

Video: Hong Kong’s iconic bamboo scaffolding

Any visitor to Hong Kong will notice that the iconic skyscrapers are built using bamboo scaffolding. It's a technique that has been used across China for at least 1,000 years.

At first, it may appear to be dangerous, but in reality, it is just as safe as any other scaffolding technique. This video from 1963 shows how the city used bamboo as it was expanding, and westernizing, its infrastructure. 

Let’s take a look back at workers erecting intricate webs of sky-high bamboo scaffolding. (Video is 90 seconds long)
http://bit.ly/2vkkIE0

Bamboo scaffolding in China

The Changchun Foreign Languages School is a very large boarding high school in Changchun in Jilin province.

The students have been assembled for their daily exercises. In the background you can see a stack of bamboo poles in front of a new high-rise school building that is under construction.

There is a lot of poles used to build scaffolding around a large high-rise building.

This photo show the building completely surrounded by bamboo scaffolding and green tarps to prevent debris from falling off the building.

This very tall high school building has elevators. As I remember it, just the teachers could use the elevators. The students had to take the stairs.