there are about 500 different species of bamboo sometimes with hundreds of subspecies.
Bamboo has been tested in comparison with concrete, steel and bricks and is generally considered stronger than everything but steel but bamboo has a tensile strength greater than that of steel.

This is a nice book
--> NN: Grow your own House, Verlag Vitra Design Museum, Weil a. Rhein 2000, ISBN 3-931936-25-2.

Also You can research about the zeri pavillion at EXPO 2000

I found the website of a guy who's using bamboo in new structural ways. He uses bamboo filled with concrete with some regularity, and uses steel connectors between culms. Here's his site:link

Here's a profile of Oscar Hidalgo, an architect who uses a lot of bamboo, with some notes on its usage: link Hidalgo warns against using concrete with bamboo.

bamboo grows very fast so it's a lot more sustainable to use bamboo over other natural materials.

Renzo Piano actually did some cool bamboo suff back in the 80's and, guess what, it's got some pretty luscious joint details.

Wow thanks alot guys that really helps. If anyone else is interested in doing this competition the website for it is

www.bamboocompetition.com

It's a pretty broad spectrum of design types and the possibility of publication.

At the Chinese pavilion in the Arsenale at the Venice (Art) Biennale 2005 there was a 20' high, 60' diameter half-woven bowl / brise-soleil / hammock / multi-chair thing on the grass in the sun.

It will be in the catalogue which you can find, overpriced, at an art bookstore near you.

I should add that said structure was made of huge huge huge bamboos

big time use as scaffolding

nARCHITECTS did their winning MOMA / PS1 design all in bamboo.

As for the sustainability of bamboo, depends on where you are. The energy spent to grown bamboo in Southeast asia and ship it to NY would make it a less favorable product than locally grown pine...

has done something with bamboo too..

check out some of yung ho chang's work.