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KANTANA

Kantana Institute

Location: Kantana Movie town, Klong-yong, Buddhamonthon, Nakhon Pathom Province,Thailand
Client: Kantana Edutainment (International) Co., Ltd.
Building type: Film and Animation Undergraduate School
Building area: 2,000 SQM
Project Year: 2011
Photographs: Spaceshift Studio, Pirak ANURAKYAWACHON, Kampon PONGPALIT

Student at Thailand's Kantana Film and Animation Institute will have an experiential understanding of the massive effort and care of a creative act. The home of undergraduate college, itself a manifestation of the country's largest film studio endeavoring to invest in local talent, was designed by Thai architect Boonserm Premthada and features eight-meter-high handmade brick walls. The architect states that the total sensory experience is universal, and therefore the built form, particularly when the program call for creative reflection should engender such a phenomena; as such over six hundred thousand handmade bricks were made locally and imbue the space with a distinctly human scale and touch.

The staggeringly thick masonry is punctuated by orthogonal apertures at irregular intervals that serve both to help ventilate the spaces and provide quiet enclaves for sitting and relaxing. While the building is supported by an inner steel structure, the gap between the inner and outer skin of the edifice guards against heat transfer and naturally cools the spaces. The school is organized into 5 different area - administration, lecture rooms, a workshop, library and a canteen - all connect by a network of axial hallways, delineated by the undulating vertical planes of brick. While the rural site was challenging, the interior forest of gray stone and concrete paths extend the learning spaces and blurs the borders between built and natural space. The compositions of mass and void is intended to inform the student's thinking and help stimulate the kind of visual story-making required in the creation of a film. This is an architecture literally form by the human body and made all the more rich by the deeply human stories that will grow within its walls.

In social way, The use of brick and innovation through the construction method are the beginning of life style change from the Jobless to become the Knowledge seeker. This construction can be treated as a breath keeping action of the local knowledge from the past prior to its extinction. What they get is not only the wages but also the opportunity that they are neglected from the society. The architect also realizes the use of "mind" and the worthiness of "hand". A story of the last brick maker village, labor workers and craft man. It reflects to living among survival situation that most architects have never interested them.