A tradition rediscovered: Toward an understanding of experiential characteristics and meanings of the traditional Thai house.

Abstract

As the center of Thailand's modernization and urbanization, Bangkok has seen, over the last four decades, an upsurge of the non-location-specific internationalized housing style, which has occurred at the cost of a gradual and unconscious depreciation of the traditional Thai house. In an attempt to solve this pressing problem, a majority of architects and scholars have concurred that it is the recapturing of the traditional spirit, not the purely physical attributes of the traditional forms, that represents the most promising trend. Unfortunately, little of the existing literature on the traditional Thai house has touched upon the experiential characteristics of the house. As a response to this gap in knowledge, this study explores the essential characteristics of the traditional Thai house, these characteristics' relations with architectonic forms, and the meanings they convey. With phenomenological hermeneutics as its philosophical ground, the exploratory study takes the form of four comparative case studies: an aesthetically acclaimed traditional house, a lived-in traditional house, an urban villa and a contemporary house with the traditional spirit. Through a layering descriptive and interpretive processes, five essential patterns emerge---the tree and <italic>rom reun</italic> quality; verticality and a hierarchical nature; enclosedness, compartmentality, drawing-in and enticing quality; graceful and refined nature; and memory and root. After a thorough consideration of the essential nature and meanings of each pattern, two types of structure are identified, namely: an intrinsic structure, which entails different modes of the human experience of a dwelling place, and an extrinsic structure---a framework of place. This latter structure reveals the many facets of a dwelling place---tactile, social, spatial (with emotional, cognitive and cultural undertones), aesthetic, and existential---and their interrelationship and significance to the human experience, including physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. Although this evolving place structure may seem comparable to existing frameworks such as Relph and Canter's model of place or Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, it is evidently more encompassing as it includes both the aesthetic and metaphysical aspects which are underdeveloped in these existing models. This structure employs an overarching metaphor, the tree, which ties the various facets of the Thai experience of place together in a meaningful whole.