Nine-Metre Arches: Ekarth's Bamboo Music Centre at IIT Madras, and What Bamboo Still Needs
On the IIT Madras campus in Chennai, a music school now stands on grass. Bamboo is a grass. Indian law called all of it a tree until 2017, when an amendment to the Indian Forest Act freed bamboo grown outside forests from felling and transit permits. The Maestro Ilaiyaraaja Centre for Music Learning and Research is what that grass can do when someone treats it as structure.
It's 10,000 sq ft of pavilions by Ekarth Studio, the young design-build practice of architect Neha Usha Jain and structural engineer Piyush Sharma. According to the studio's figures, published by Dezeen, the 80-seat auditorium at its heart has nine-metre-high arches and a column-free span of 15 metres. Around it sit two 20-seat classrooms, a 50-seat classroom and a recording studio. The plan follows the bel patra, the three-lobed bael leaf. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated it on Sunday, Oct 11, IANS reported.
The studio's line to Dezeen is the one everyone will quote: "For decades, bamboo has been perceived as a 'poor man's timber'." The building is meant to end that, and it makes a strong case.
Splits, sticks and round culms
The interesting part is the kit. Ekarth uses three forms of bamboo: round culms, bundled splits and bundled sticks. The primary spine beams are bundles of flat splits. Thin strips, stacked into bundles, bend into curves a round pole won't easily take. That's how you get a doubly curved vault out of a material that grows straight.
The studio says skilled artisans did the splitting, bending, bundling and joining "primarily with basic carpentry tools", while structural engineering refined each step for a long-span building. The whole centre took eleven months, with little heavy machinery. Lime finishes, earthen surfaces and natural-fibre roof tiles fill in around the bamboo.
The idea is older than the building. IIT Madras signed the agreement with Ilaiyaraaja in May 2024, and the composer laid the foundation stone during the SPIC MACAY convention on campus. He said he hoped it would produce 200 new Ilaiyaraajas. The institute framed the brief: a building made mostly of natural materials, under its "Music for All" research programme.
Ekarth documented its first house in detail
Jain and Sharma each found their way, separately, to the Auroville Bamboo Centre before starting Ekarth. Their first building was The Firefly, a two-storey bamboo villa at Amsing in Assam. Bamboo U's write-up of that house, drawn from the studio's own information, is full of specifics. Primary structure in Bambusa balcooa, harvested within 100 km of the site. Samples tested for modulus of elasticity, compressive and shear strength. Five species in all, each with a named job. Bamboo specialists Jörg Stamm, Neil Thomas and Vinc Math are credited for structure and training.
For the IIT Madras building, the published record so far is thinner. None of the coverage we found names the species, the preservative treatment, the joint hardware or an engineer of record beyond the studio, or credits individual builders. Ekarth's own team page lists its staff, including a lead artisan, Zakir Hussain, and a production lead, Rakibul Islam, who runs sourcing and treatment.
A bamboo building becomes a precedent when its spec is public
The arches settle whether bamboo can carry an institution. They don't settle whether the next architect can repeat it. We'd argue that bamboo architecture in India stops being "poor man's timber" when a district PWD engineer can open a file and see what was used, how it was treated and who built it. That's an ask of the whole field, not of one studio.
Much of it should already exist. The studio says it developed the engineered structure "closely with IIT Madras". India's bamboo design code, IS 15912:2018, asks for culms at least four years old, treated to IS 9096. It lists 16 species recommended for structure, grouped by strength, and says any other species must be tested first. A 15 m span built to that standard has a paper trail.
Studios have good reasons to keep it private. Design-build practices sell know-how, and a published joint detail is a free lesson for a competitor. That's a real cost for a small office. So the clearest place to start is the client. IIT Madras is a public institute that sells itself on research, and a teaching building can teach. The institute could publish the species, the treatment schedule and the bundle details alongside the studio, and put the builders' names on a plaque by the door, the way the Firefly write-up names its consultants.
Bamboo's old reputation came from buildings nobody documented: sheds, scaffolds, flood shelters, put up by people whose names no one wrote down. Fine arches are a start. A shared drawing set would finish the job.
Look at the feet of the arches
If you visit, look past the vault shots. Look at where the bundles meet the ground, where rain splashes back. Look for any sign of the treatment. And ask IIT Madras whose hands split all that bamboo. A building this good deserves a full credit list.
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