New shoots for an old building material

While the University of Pittsburgh’s Kent Harries, PhD, FASCE, FACI, FIIFC, PEng, claims to have stumbled into bamboo research, today he is helping lead the charge to advance bamboo testing and design standards worldwide and to foster a thriving international community that sees its tremendous potential.

“Bamboo is an incredibly strong, abundant material that can serve as a sustainable alternative in building structures,” said Harries, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in the Swanson School of Engineering. “It’s also fascinating. Every time you look at it, you see something new.”

Harries recently co-authored the first structural engineering manual for bamboo, which offers detailed guidance and commentary to the 2021 International Organization for Standardization (ISO) bamboo standards for which he also led the writing team. His work is advancing a path to safer, more affordable, and sustainable construction while inspiring a new generation of engineers.

From aspiring architect to structural engineer

Growing up in Canada, Harries didn’t have a bamboo-themed LEGO set because they didn’t exist. He enjoyed playing with LEGO all the same and with Meccano construction sets; both fueled his desire to design and create. So did his parents. “They’d hand me paper and encourage me to design my ideal cabin,” Harries recalled. He’d set to work developing intricate plans, and, as he said, “It went from there.”

Harries earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in Engineering and Applied Mechanics at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

“I’m a true failed architect,” he said. “All through elementary school, through high school, I was going into architecture. In university, I started in architecture and realized that what I thought was architecture was structural engineering.”

Discovering bamboo’s promise

For much of his career, Harries has researched wood, steel, and concrete. He is an expert in the use of materials and in structures like the bridges and buildings they are used to create. He has written international building codes and standards and authored countless papers exploring their use, and he is often sought out for his expertise by journalists around the globe.

In 2006, however, Harries recruited Bhavna Sharma (CEE PhD ’10) to Pitt. Now an associate professor at the University of Southern California and a leader in engineered bamboo research, Sharma joined the Swanson School as a PhD student to study bamboo structures in India and their ability to withstand earthquakes.

The two would later edit a book about nonconventional and vernacular construction materials. For Harries, the research set in motion what has turned Pitt into an international hub of bamboo research.

Pursuing something “unfundable”

“I had a plan to do something that I perceived as being ‘unfundable,’” Harries said of his research into bamboo. Unexpectedly, his plan took root.

In 2014, he received US Department of State funding to organize three international bamboo symposia, in Winnipeg, Pittsburgh, and Jakarta, which would foster a growing community to advance bamboo research. At the Pittsburgh symposium in 2016, researchers made the case for bamboo in the Pittsburgh Declaration.

In 2016, Harries received a $300,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to investigate and model bamboo with researchers in Puerto Rico.

In 2025, he welcomed Italian researcher Luisa Molari, from the University of Bologna, to spend a semester at Pitt on a Fulbright grant. The two collaborated to model bamboo and standardize how it is tested.

Toward stronger, clearer codes and standards

Although bamboo has been used as a building material for thousands of years, only recently have researchers developed international standards. In 2000, Dutch researcher Jules Janssen’s "Designing and Building with Bamboo" was published, and the first technical standards were adopted by the ISO in 2004.

“It’s important to get those first standards, the ‘version zero,’ published. They provide the jumping-off point to begin developing stronger ones,” Harries said.

With longtime collaborator David Trujillo, an assistant professor of humanitarian engineering at the University of Warwick in England, Harries did just that. The two revised the test method and design standards for bamboo, which were published by ISO in 2019 and 2021, respectively.

While working on them, Harries applied another of his research areas: understanding and mitigating complexity in building codes and standards. “Codes are hugely important,” he said, “but if builders can’t understand them, they start to lose their efficacy.”

Harries used these bamboo standards as a case study to investigate the importance of producing clearer, more concise specifications. The research led him to revise his own work.

In addition to revising the standards, Harries and Trujillo, along with engineers Sebastian Kaminski and Luis Felipe Lopez, set to work developing the first structural engineering manual for bamboo, which was first published in November of 2025. The four experts, all members of the International Bamboo and Rattan Organization (INBAR), provide detailed information about bamboo and guidance for building with it.

“The manual explains where these revised standards come from and how they can be used,” Harries said. “It also provides a roadmap for the next iteration of the standards.”

Rhizomes

Bamboo, which belongs to the grass family, is rhizomic, spreading underground and popping up new shoots. Anyone who has grown bamboo in their backyard, or who has lived next door to someone who has, knows this well. And just as bamboo will spread, Harries’ research has grown and created opportunities for his students.

“There have been about 40 Pitt undergraduate students who have traveled abroad for bamboo-related research projects,” Harries said. “There have been multiple PhDs, and I’ve even had high school students work on bamboo research.”

The projects have built community worldwide, improved international bamboo standards, and created first-of-its-kind guidance. They have shed new light on a sustainable material that has been an essential building block in many countries for centuries.

On January 1, 2025, LEGO launched its first bamboo kit. The set, with its many curved pieces, hardly captures the kind of LEGO Harries grew up with. Yet the existence of such a set speaks to bamboo’s current cultural cachet, one that Harries is excited to help spread.