An Organized Chaos
The famous quote by Sir Winston Churchill, “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us” comes into my mind every time I visit old communities in Bangkok. Studying architecture in Bangkok is an amazing experience and beneficial for me to broaden my understanding about how people in old community live? How multifunction spaces are created in different ways? And how significant is the public spaces especially the streets and alleys and how they play their roles in harmonizing varied users and their activities.
As most of us visited Ban Panthom for the first time, I guess all my fellow field school participants experienced similar feelings about this living historic place as being different, unique, and most importantly a vital part of Thai identity. It was interesting to notice that there was no standardization, the feeling of uniqueness comes from the realization of how dissimilar of every house and spaces shape the informal ways of living. The different width of streets and alleys, things organized, hanged, and put informally, diverse colours, and stray dogs playing with pet cats. The complex relationship between local people and places in Ban Panthom can be described as ‘organized chaos.’
Drawing close to the sixth day of visit in Ban Pantom, nothing is obtained and learnt in easy ways as all the videos, interviews and measurements of houses are gained through hands-on exercises. We learn to engage with the community through conversations, and knowing the challenges and difficulties to approach the residents who have language barriers (especially immigrants from neighboring Thai countries), different work timings (most immigrants work late nights, serving tourists at nearby Khao San Road), in addition, the lack of trust between us and the residents as they only known us for less than a week. Hence, the experiences of community engagement in Ban Panthom are valuable for us not just to think about this community, but critically consider about affordable housing issues that are faced by most of the developing cities in the Asian region. We hope to shape our buildings in a sustainable way, minimizing waste and forging better social cohesion among communities.
