Elora Hardy facts for kids

Elora Hardy (born 1980) is a Canadian designer who started a company called IBUKU. She is famous for designing amazing bamboo homes and buildings, especially near Denpasar in Bali, Indonesia. She worked with her team at IBUKU and her father, John Hardy, to create these unique structures.

Elora was born in Canada but grew up in Bali. When she was 14, she moved to the United States for school. She studied fine arts and then worked in the fashion world, even designing prints for the famous brand Donna Karan. In 2010, Elora moved back to Bali. That's when she started Ibuku, a design company that uses bamboo and other natural materials to build homes and other structures. Since then, Ibuku has built over 90 bamboo buildings in Southeast Asia and Africa, including parts of the Green School Bali campus. Elora also designed a yoga area and a cooking classroom at the Four Seasons in Bali. She also worked on the inside of Tri restaurant in Hong Kong, made furniture for the Como Marketplace in Singapore, and designed tree-house suites at Bambu Indah.

Because of her amazing work with bamboo buildings, Elora Hardy was named an Architectural Digest Innovator in 2013. In 2015, she gave a TED Talk called “Magical houses, made of bamboo.” By early 2019, this talk had been watched over four million times!

Elora Hardy's Life Story

Elora Hardy was born in Canada in 1980. Her parents, Penny Berton and John Hardy, were both very creative and artistic. They moved to Bali, Indonesia, in the 1970s. Elora grew up surrounded by many friendly artists and craftspeople from nearby villages. These talented people taught her how to carve, paint, and do batik. Batik is a special Indonesian way of dyeing fabric using wax to create patterns. As a child, Elora loved to create things, especially princesses and fairies. She even got to design and decorate her own room! Once, when her mom asked her to draw her dream house, Elora drew a fairy house that looked like a mushroom with windows and a door.

Elora's mother, Penny Berton, was a jewelry designer. She worked with local goldsmiths to make beautiful, hand-carved jewelry.

In the 1990s, Elora's father, John Hardy, and his second wife, Cynthia Hardy, started a very successful international jewelry company called John Hardy.

When Elora was a young adult, she moved to the United States and lived there for 14 years. First, she went to a boarding school for the arts called Idyllwild Arts Academy in California. Later, in 2004, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Tufts University. The next year, Elora moved to Manhattan, New York. She became a print designer for the Donna Karan Collection and later for the famous DKNY brand. For five years in New York, she painted on fabric and used computer graphics to create prints and designs. Even though she loved New York, she felt a strong pull to go back to Asia to help the environment.

When her father and stepmother sold their jewelry company, they started focusing on building an eco-friendly school in Bali. By 2008, the Green School was open, and people from all over the world wanted to send their children there. In 2010, Elora decided to move back to Indonesia. She joined her father and a group of skilled artists and home designers to build houses made of bamboo. There was such a high demand for environmentally friendly homes that her father saw it as a great chance to use his skills. The same group of people had also helped build the Green School.

Elora's grandfather was a famous Canadian person named Pierre Berton.

Building Amazing Homes with Bamboo

Since the early 2000s, John Hardy, Elora's father, had been trying out different ways to use bamboo in buildings. He wanted to create homes that were good for the environment. He was inspired by Linda Garland, who helped show how bamboo could be used in modern buildings. Instead of worrying about climate change, John and his wife decided to act. They wanted to create a world that was more sustainable and better for nature. Bamboo grows naturally on land and isn't used as food for crops. If it's treated correctly, bamboo can last for many decades. When it's no longer needed, it can go back into nature without causing harm. They made a plan to use bamboo in their designs, and Elora joined their project. Their bamboo designs were made to create "beautiful curves that created comfy spaces."

After helping to create the Green School, Elora started IBUKU. This company is made up of skilled craftspeople, architects, and designers who build houses and create items only from bamboo. "IBU-" means 'mother' and "-KU" means 'me,' so Ibuku means 'my mother nature.' Elora saw that bamboo had great potential as a building material. It's strong and good for the environment. She explains that every step of treating the bamboo must be done carefully. Also, every part of how it's used in the design must be thought about to keep it strong and long-lasting. This careful process makes projects take a bit longer to finish.

After the Green School, Elora and her Ibuku team worked on their next big project: the Green Village. Like the Green School, it was built completely out of bamboo. Bamboo can even be used to build very large things like bridges. It can also be much cheaper than using materials like steel and aluminum. These benefits became even clearer in their work on the Sharma Springs Bamboo Trace House. Bamboo was becoming a great alternative to expensive building materials.

Bamboo: A Sustainable Choice

By using bamboo, Elora highlights sustainable design in her projects. Bamboo is one of many materials that are sustainable, and people have used it for many years. It can hold heavy weights, is flexible, and is very good at resisting earthquakes. There are 1,450 different types of bamboo, and they grow in huge amounts in warm, tropical parts of the world. They grow very quickly. Some types of bamboo can grow from two inches an hour to one and a half meters (about 5 feet) per day! They can become strong enough to be used as building columns in just 4 years. Plus, they easily grow back for many years without needing much care. This makes bamboo incredibly sustainable. These are just some of the benefits of using bamboo in modern buildings and what it could mean for the future of construction materials.

Since no two bamboo shoots are exactly alike, using them in a home design can be tricky. Bamboo pieces come in different curves and sizes. Each piece must be carefully chosen by hand for every spot in a building. Elora sees this as a good chance to be a flexible designer. She has to adjust not just the bamboo but also her ideas until everything fits perfectly. Often, the final result is even better than what they first imagined! Just like bamboo, Elora is not a typical architect who is limited by rules. Bamboo can't bend exactly how someone might want it to, and Elora didn't study architecture in the traditional way. This freedom has helped her design buildings in very creative ways.

As a sustainable designer, Elora has learned to create her own rules to best fit what her clients need. She also makes sure to include nature in her designs. She has learned to respect bamboo, design with its strengths in mind, protect it, and create beautiful shapes with its natural curves. Sustainable design is becoming a very important part of home building for architects. The choices an architect makes can either reduce or increase how much energy a building uses. Sustainable design is about creating spaces that are healthy and good for both people and the environment. Architects and designers continue to look for new ways to be more resourceful while creating buildings that have a positive impact on the environment and the people who use them. This helps create a world that is more sustainable and better for everyone.

See also

In Spanish: Elora Hardy para niños

• Bamboo construction
• Sustainable design
• A Tree House in Bali
• Sustainable Bamboo Buildings
• Bamboo Homes
• Modern Sustainable Architecture
• Natural Technology Application in Architecture