Category Archives: Pongtida Santayanon

Life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills

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The goal of economic wealth is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce as many stuff as you want. Stuff is a means. Yet the present aspect of the people on economy has always been focusing on means.

 

We tend to define the health of a community, a city, or a country according to how much economic capital (like cash flow and property value) and how much cultural capital (like birth of museums or festivals it holds) it has. But by taking only economic and cultural capital into account, we are missing a huge part of the whole thing here. We all know things can run smoothly, and sometimes very effectively accelerated with only individual to individual, a household to a household, a neighborhood to another neighborhood, but what about the connections?  Networks and mutual support systems among the residents of a community. Architecture couldn’t even live a day without these connections. It would be dead, deserted, and malfunctioned. Even a self-sufficient building couldn’t survive. This has happened to countless of Summer camp. We architectural students try to put our know-how into the hand of children in rural area. There has never been good connections between people from the city and those kids. The only connection would be a good will. Without studying of how lives there go on each day, studying of history, studying of surroundings materials or geological balance, mimicking ourselves as them, we could never make a connection. So no, without the linkage between whatever the city, the country or the people  is offering to the architecture, a part of the building will always be counted as social capital loss.

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