Visit Notes from Panyaden Green Primary School in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Photography/ Ally Taylor

The site of Panyaden School is located on the highest mountain in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where there is a vast, flat rice field that was formerly a fruit orchard.

Surrounded on all sides by lush, abundant greenery, this mountain school with a 5000 sq m expanse uses the veins of the fronds of a tropical rainforest plant - the staghorn fern - as the design concept for the spatial layout and circulation of its school buildings, allowing the campus to grow as much as possible within the natural ecology of the land to which it belongs, just as stated in Panyaden's founding philosophy: "Everything the school builds is taken from the earth, and so are all its activities, and all of this is based on mindfulness of environmental protection."

Aiming to provide holistic education, Panyaden School not only teaches students internationally applicable skills such as reading, writing, mathematics and languages, but also teaches basic life skills, for example: growing rice and vegetables, sewing and how to eat healthily... The surrounding cultivation of vegetables and rice follows organic farming methods, without pesticides, to reduce damage to the land; wastewater treatment and food waste recycling and regeneration are used to produce fertilizer and biogas to replace the electricity and cooking energy needed in daily life, thoroughly implementing a low-carbon lifestyle, so that students' life at school becomes a microcosm of life as a whole.

Under the philosophy of cultivating green citizens of the earth, Panyaden School commissioned the 24H > architecture team to realize their dream of building the school, hoping that the final form of the school building design could preserve the ecology of the original forest land, with the original intention of developing organically, and be in harmony with both the earth and humanity.

The school's architecture mainly consists of two types: first, the classroom spaces, which are composed of load-bearing rammed-earth walls forming a long strip-like space, divided at the front and back into 3 small classrooms; the outer walls are built of adobe bricks, and the windows are frames made from locally recycled hardwood strips, with recycled glass bottle pieces forming a glass window that allows natural light to enter the interior of the classroom. The indoor shelves are all arranged around the slightly naturally curved adobe walls, while the bamboo roof, neatly built with fine craftsmanship, is designed with lines that echo the undulating contours of the neighboring mountains.

Second, the public spaces, used for general functional purposes such as the auditorium and cafeteria, are basically open shed structures, with symmetrical stone blocks on both sides as foundations, bundles of bamboo embedded into the foundation stones, and the sturdy bamboo bundles erected and connected to the roof as supports, while the irregular ceiling, shaped after the imagery of leaves or birds, covers everything with its huge, high-spanning form, so that people walking beneath it feel as if they are strolling freely and easily through a deep, dense bamboo forest.

"Life is a deeper and more abundant burning than work." Panyaden private primary school, which accommodates only 375 students, provides children with an omnipresent green life through this educational philosophy that values nature and humanity. And the meaning of green architecture here is that it provides, in an environment of coexistence between humans and nature, a creative architectural proposal for how, when construction is unavoidable, we can think more deeply about how the two can continue and coexist together.

In the field of architecture, a superior mentality of unit proliferation and aggressive colonization is still practiced, yet it often produces a great many creations that are genetically similar but unrelated to their region. In view of this, "local" is no longer limited to the scope of a particular country or ethnicity, or to endless spread and expansion under a native consciousness. Instead, it is replaced by a basic care for the earth and observation of life, which can begin anywhere, at any time.

Just as the members of the 24H > architecture team often move directly onto the construction site, and only after long-term on-site observation, integration into the lives of local residents and in-depth exploration of the environment do they extract its rich terrain as design elements for an architectural project. Therefore, we can see a restaurant hanging sixteen feet up in a tree like a bird's nest; beneath a canopy shaped like some kind of primitive fish, hearing children's clear recitation; a thatched granary that forever maintains the posture of moving wind, drifting in order like rising waves; and a warm custom guest room nestled in something like a four-legged animal, where one can lie high upon it and, at night, quietly look down over the entire river... It can be said that this kind of architectural design borrows light and fire from nature, while itself transforms into a small spark of the earth, shimmering brightly.

Source: Chiang Mai Green School http://www.panyaden.ac.th/
24H architecture firm: www.24h-architecture.com
This article will be published simultaneously in Guangzhou Southern Metropolis Daily