Reimagining Bicycle Craftsmanship — Our Kit at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris
Reimagining Bicycle Craftsmanship - LUXEMBOURG MUSEUM James Marr, Founder, Bamboo Bicycle Club This a short article written for the Luxembourg Museum Paris for a upcoming exhibition which will feature our home build kit and we were invited to write a...
In November 2023, the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris invited us to take part in its exhibition programme. A Bamboo Bicycle Club home-build kit went on display, and James Marr — who founded the club in 2012 with Ian McMillan — wrote an essay for the exhibition manual.
The idea on show
The essay made a simple argument: in a world of mass-produced consumer products, very little thought goes into how things are designed, what they are made of, and how they are made. A bamboo bicycle, built by the person who rides it, is the opposite of that. Each frame is shaped around one body, one rider, one set of choices.
Since 2012 more than 4,000 people in over 36 countries have built their own bamboo bike from the same instructions — road bikes, mountain bikes and more — sized to the person rather than to a standard frame chart.
Why bamboo
We chose bamboo because it is a genuine engineering material that is still underused in cycling: a strong, light tube with natural vibration-damping, grown rather than mined. The frames are joined with recycled aluminium lugs, and some builds add flax or carbon as a composite.
A continuing relationship with the museum
The 2023 invitation was not a one-off. In March 2024, BBC frames featured again at the Musée du Luxembourg in Match, Design & Sport — A Story Looking to the Future, curated by the designer Konstantin Grcic and timed to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Why it matters
"Bamboo Bicycle Club follows a niche-manufacturing business model that prioritises knowledge-sharing over profit-making retail."
— Huck Magazine, 2014
That sentence, written about us a decade earlier, is still the point. Putting a build kit in a museum is not about selling more kits. It is about showing that people can make the things they use — and learn something lasting in the process.
Links
- Musée du Luxembourg exhibition note: https://bamboobicycleclub.org/blogs/news/luxembourg-city-history-museum-bamboo-bicycle-club-paris-exhibition
- Paris 2024 / Konstantin Grcic feature: https://bamboobicycleclub.org/blogs/news/wallpaper-bamboo-bicycle-club-featured-in-konstantin-grcics-paris-2024-olympic-exhibition
- Huck Magazine (2014): https://www.huckmag.com/article/bamboo-bicycle-club
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