Marco Ferrari Cristina Gallizioli Maria Giulia Milani
Italy
At the origin of architecture, each culture responded inventively to a set of everyday needs: to sleep, to eat, to clean, to chill, to socialize… Although the actions involved are the same, each cultural group developed his own specific way to turn these actions into space, telling a unique story and adding a personal use related to local meanings. These traditional typologies were purely innovative, if we consider innovation as solving a problem in a different way: they constituted an heritage of ideas and uses that no other culture ever had, an open set of solutions.
With the rise of globalization the different cultural inventions are converging in an average model, forcing the local complexities to flatten in one single expression, wiping away many unique spatial solutions. Seeing the potential of vernacular means to see multitude as a virtue, looking for different stories on how peoples responded to the same basic questions.
Instead of keeping on modernizing just a single spatial standard, we tried to focus on these local inventions, starting from their pure and not yet spoiled aspects as a key to produce new significant spaces. Thus we decided to develop a method rather than a project, taking 5 Thai traditional spaces related to a generic daily routine, typologies that show their elements of innovation in adapting an usual situation to local forms of use. Emphasizing their unique feature led to strengthen the identity of a specific culture through revealing the elements of originality lying in tradition, rediscovering the uniqueness of the past as a source for designing significant contemporary spaces.
Because future is bold, we need bold spaces to live in, innovation being not a single outstanding act of extravagance but a method for searching the unexpected originalities in the everyday reality.
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