A Bamboo Bicycle Club bike in Konstantin Grcic's 'Match, Design & Sport' at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris
In 2024, a Bamboo Bicycle Club bamboo bicycle was shown in "Match, Design & Sport — A Story Looking to the Future", an exhibition curated by the industrial designer Konstantin Grcic at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, the gallery run by Grand Palais RMN. The exhibition ran from 13 March to 11 August 2024, timed with the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, and looked at how design and sport shape each other.
What was on show
The exhibition set sporting objects next to the design thinking behind them — from a Hermès showjumping saddle to prosthetic limbs, a Paralympic rugby wheelchair, and the JogBra prototype. Among them was a bamboo bicycle from Bamboo Bicycle Club: a frame grown rather than smelted, built by hand rather than mass-produced.
That is the whole point of what we make. A BBC frame is designed around the person riding it and put together by their own hands, in a material they can grow. Seeing one of those bikes in a Paris design exhibition says the idea stands on its own terms.
Why it matters
Bamboo Bicycle Club has shown work at leading design institutions including the London Design Museum and the Grand Palais in Paris (Musée du Luxembourg is part of Grand Palais RMN). Being included in a curated, Olympic-year exhibition puts the case for hand-built, lower-impact bikes in front of an audience that thinks hard about objects and how they are made.
We also have a separate connection to Luxembourg City: a Bamboo Bicycle Club connector has been exhibited at the Luxembourg City History Museum. The two are different institutions in different countries — both worth telling, neither worth merging.
Press
The exhibition was covered independently by Wallpaper\* and Designboom, both of which carried an image of the bamboo bicycle credited to the Bamboo Bicycle Club team.
Links
- Wallpaper* — Konstantin Grcic, "Match, Design & Sport"
- Designboom — Konstantin Grcic, "Match: future of design & sport", Musée du Luxembourg
- Musée du Luxembourg (Grand Palais RMN)