Sokasi Cooking Class at Four Season Sayan

The Sokasi Cooking School was built for the Four Seasons Ubud on the bank of the Ayung River in Sayan, Bali, a sister structure to the Yoga Pavilion we built for them a few years earlier. Bamboo is an appropriate choice for a Balinese cooking school as Balinese people have a long tradition of using bamboo (utensils, sate sticks, rice steamers) in the cooking process. This structure is a little different than most Bamboo Pure buildings in that Sokasi utilizes ‘bambu tali’ (gigantochloa apus) as the structural material, instead of the usual “bambu petung” (dendrocalamus asper) Tali bamboo is constantly used in Balinese daily life and is crucial to every Balinese ceremony or event—used for shade structures, as a rope material, to create satay sticks and rice baskets. The scale of the Sokasi structure allowed us to use this smaller diameter species of bamboo to create rebreb curving arches, which criss-cross each other in a wild random way, resulting in a basket-like structure, familiar to Balinese traditions. Ibuku describes this building as the harmony of two elements: sustainable architecture and Balinese culinary wisdom.