Elora Hardy

Elora Hardy IBUKU - Bali, Indonesia

Elora Hardy is the Founder and Creative Director of IBUKU, where design begins with the principles of nature, employing the natural tendencies of bamboo, stone, water and topography to build over two hundred homes, hotels, schools, and work spaces. For over twelve years, Elora leads the international team in creating hospitality projects, school campuses, private homes, and bespoke furniture collections made of natural materials and built in ways that reconnect us with nature. She envisions a world where we live elegantly within nature. Elora was raised in Bali, inspired by highly-skilled craftsmen who shaped dreams into reality. As a child Elora ran through Bali’s natural wonder. She went on to study art and design. After painting Donna Karan’s runway dresses by hand and leading DKNY’s prints and patterns, she sought to apply that design sense to ecologically uplifting spaces. In 2010, Elora began to carry on the incredible work of the team that created the world-renowned Green School in Bali, founded by her father John Hardy and his wife, Cynthia Hardy. Today, she cultivates Balinese artisans alongside innovative designers, architects and engineers. IBUKU’s works have won multiple awards and have been featured in AppleTV+ docuseries Home, Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, Vogue, Tatler, London Design Week, CNN and the BBC. She was named an Architectural Digest Innovator on the AD100 list and was named Honorary Royal Designer for Industry (Hon) in 2019.

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Project Details

Type of ProjectInstitutional
TypeCompleted Work
LocationBali, Indonesia

The Arc at Greenschool

The Arc is not only an incredible work of bamboo architecture, but will also stand out as a new reference in lightweight structures altogether. Significant for its structural system, this totally unprecedented building required months of research and development for its creation. The Arc employs one of nature’s greatest strategies for creating large spaces with minimal structure. Arches working in compression are held in place by tensioned anticlastic gridshells. These gridshells appear to drape across the spaces between impossibly thin arches soaring overhead, giving a whimsy, intimacy and beauty to the space. The gridshells appear to hang from the arches, weighing them down, but in reality the gridshells themselves are structural, helping to redistribute the weight along the arches.Completed on Earth Day in 2021, The Arc is 23,5m (75 ft) wide, 41 m (134 ft) long and 14 m (46ft) tall. Its floor area is 760 sqm (8,180 sf).

Photo Credit : Tommaso Riva