Archisteem 7: Friendly Architecture Curation - Bringing Back the Paddy Field

Today's curated project: Lanna Community Center

This project is led by Somdoon Architects which took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The project covered 800m² and was completed in 2016. The project was the winning works of an open competition organized by Association of Siamese Architects under the royal patronage.

This is a very down to the earth building that doesn’t portray the typical, modern and boring image of a mall that we usually see around. The modern buildings that are homogenous and almost same all around the place may be aesthetically great, but they may not represent the culture and people from the local context, making them an awkward present.

In developing countries of Southeast Asia, we always faced identity issues in the local architecture as every cities and town grow at a very fast pace with typical buildings for commercial, office and hospitality use. The development does not adopt with local culture but copied western modern architecture. I would take it this way that we are not well educated to appreciate our local culture and style, lacking the innovative spirit to redefine it into a modern version. Therefore, taking the easier and faster path by copy what the westerners had is the best solution. That is how we get our township to look so alike in all places.

In this project, we can see a whole new image brought by the architect for the local community center. The key concept for the project is to interpret the Lanna local culture and embed into the building design. With the understanding of “Lanna” as millions of rice fields which is a rare image in Chiang Mai nowadays, the architect planned to use this scarcity as an opportunity. The architect literally makes the architecture to showcase rice fields on the top of the buildings while putting all the main functional spaces underneath. It is a clever move as to give the plants it's daylight consumption while shading the visitors from sun and rain.

The community center hosted different supporting facilities like library, café, office and a gathering space that can be a theatre or a cultural meeting space for the public. The materials were selected from the local and using traditional detailing to fuse the elements of modernism as one, making the building unique in its way. Again, it is a great example of the old meeting the new and method on how to make two eras blend along.

It is indeed an inspirational project for the young architects to pick up and learn how to respect the local culture and how to innovate from the old, existing rich culture.

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Source of images used and reference article. Click here

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Hope you enjoy the curation. If you have any projects that you wished to be curated, do drop a comment to me. Any critics and suggestions about my curation are welcome!

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This is an #archisteem post.

A new tag that is to curate our existing built environment and also future built environment development. Want to know more? Read here.

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