PEOPLE
Architecture generally is social, or should be social. Because we are working for the people.
our own projects with sometimes very small funding and it was just a lot of fun. It was hands-on, it was immediate, it was happening there, it was very local, it was very sustainable. We worked with local people where although there was a language barrier, we overcame that, and learnt a few words here and there. At some point in 2013, we were asked to present our work at an exhibition called Think Global, Build Social at the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt. We had to come up with a name for our studio and realised that we had not thought about that since we were busy with our projects. From there other things started to happen. We were asked to present at universities in Bangkok; and got published in some magazines and books. That was also the time when we presented our work at FuturArc, I believe.
Until this exhibition in 2013, we didn’t even hear about the movement of social architecture. For me, architecture generally is social, or should be social. Because we are working for the people, so that’s a very social aspect of what architecture is. We were using this opportunity to share our work and also share about the civil war conflict in Burma. There is a lot of land-grabbing issues and exploitation of natural resources, and we used the media as a way to talk about these issues. That was very important to us.
We spent about seven years there, and we still have very strong relationships and bonds to the communities over there. I am still running a few projects such as an office building for an Italian organisation and a kindergarten for a local community-based organisation. We did a design that included rammed earth and a green roof. Generally, it has gotten a bit quiet, but this is what sometimes happens; projects are put on hold. And once a year, usually around February, we plan a design-and-build project in Mae Sot, where communities come together and build a school/classroom for migrants. We had to cancel it this year (2021), but hopefully there will be a project in February 2022. If people are interested, they can get in touch with me via my homepage or social media platforms.
CL: The concept of social architecture, like you’ve said to me, might be very obvious. But maybe to the majority, the element of social is not always front and centre. So that’s why sometimes we have problems with projects, especially the bigger ones. People want to do this or that, using this or that technology, sometimes without considering the people element. What inspires you to start a design for a particular project in this way or use certain materials? JG: We can start with one that I did in 2020. It started before the COVID-19 outbreak, when I could still travel out of Europe. Now that I am based in Europe again, it is actually my idea to do at least one or two projects in Thailand or other parts. The budget was $1,800, and I paid for my own costs (I did these projects pro-bono). And I leveraged my network in Asia and Europe for manpower.
We built a classroom. I think it was a great experience for the rest of the community, the people, and the students of that school. This time I had four students from Germany; two of them were already travelling in the winter to Asia anyway, so it wasn’t very far for them to come over. And I had some connections to some universities in Bangkok. In this case it was the Assumption University. They came with a group of students for two to three days to do an adobe workshop. And then we had a college, Harrow International School, which had a branch in Bangkok. They came with 40 students for this. So, on one side it’s a workshop—people are getting exposed to the material, getting exposed to the way of building, and getting their hands dirty; hands-on stuff. Also, learning about the material is easy; everyone can just pick up the technique of building with adobe bricks in a short time—it’s not very complicated. That’s actually what I wanted to do—expose people and have them think about the over-use of concrete, which is very obvious in Thailand, and just work as a group. Also have them mixing with the local migrants, children, making friends and doing things together. We use a lot of local materials and we recycled a lot of materials. There are wood shops there where they collect the wood from old Thai houses that have been taken down, and we even had to de-nail and polish them. In the end, we built the classroom in five weeks, with a lot of support from various groups. If you have 60 pairs of hands, including the students doing adobe bricks, stuff moves very fast.
I always try to use materials that I find locally—although it doesn’t mean that it has to be on-site—but I try to use as much as there’s available. It reduces transportation costs and carbon emissions. For this project, we also hired two workers from the local community who were paid a good daily wage. It was a very vibrant atmosphere when you have some 30 to 40 people working on a small project, with all hands
FUTURARC 63
9 Mae Tao Clinic Boarding House (by a.gor.a Architects before 2017)
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