Sustainable housing in Amphawa canal, Thailand

BACKGROUND Amphawa canal is Thai water-based community located at the north gulf of Thailand in Samutsongkhram province, around 80 – 100 kilometers west of the capital, Bangkok. It has been a popular tourism destination in the past 10 years because of its rich cultural river-life atmosphere, the way of social living in harmony with waterside. Amphawa canal has been categorized as one of the most important case studies of cultural value, historical value and environment in many fields of study. In 2008, the Amphawa canal community earned an honorable mention prize from UNESCO Asia-pacific heritage awards for its great identities, both tangible and intangible. Accordingly, the district is heading toward to peak of the tourism booming age, nowadays the district receives average 10,000 tourists a day and tends to increase dramatically. ABSTRACT According to the fast- grow situation of Amphawa community, the Propose of this project, firstly, is to provide an affordable residence and common facilities for the local villagers (mostly farmers & fishermen) who were enforced to move out and migrate from the homeland by house owners or landlords to gain higher rental fee from new tenants who are investors and entrepreneurs from the nearby city and the capital city. Furthermore, since the numerous of touristic approach without proper management plan leads to many negative effects on environment, massive consumption of energy and also transform the ecological system. Moreover, on architectural appearance point of view, lots of vernacular architectures those characterize the unique identity of Amphawa has been converted or replaced by superficial building typologies without understanding the context lead to the deterioration of values. This project, therefore, represents the challenge to make the difference in order to minimize the negative environmental impacts of the building by integrating current day building technology and local wisdom knowledge and also creating an appropriate appearance of architecture that can sensitively blend in with the context and works functionally with tropical climate, the project will deals with the agenda of sustainable for future development relate to environment, the collaboration of building technique, materials selection process and living standard of users, all through consideration of the contextual factors.