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Architects: AOMO
- Area: 1980 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:DOF Sky|Ground
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Manufacturers: AluV, Bluescope, D-Lite
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Lead Architect: Sivichai Udomvoranun
Text description provided by the architects. Puhai Office Building, a 4-story office building with a gross area of 2,294 sqm., is located on New Petchaburi Road. The site has a large number of existing trees. The owner and we decided to keep as many trees as possible. We relocate those smaller trees aside and wait to plant them back after the construction. We keep 2 very big trees on the site where they are. We locate the building to make a way to coexist between buildings and trees.
The project is located on Sanseab canal and is surrounded by many offices’ buildings. Most of them are located on high-rise buildings and are enclosure areas. We want to make our project different and provide another alternative for the work environment. We want to create a community of workplaces to make the users enjoy their work life more. The people will be more relaxed and interact more with others in the project. We designed to divide the buildings into 3 parts to let the natural ventilation and light inside more and to minimize the building scale as well. This also brings natural light into the office space as well as reduces the use of electricity in the daytime. The project is composed of 3 buildings to keep our big trees. Two buildings are office spaces, and the other is a service core for stairs, elevator, WC, and all mechanical rooms. The service building which is more solid we put against the West side to shield the project from the sun.
For the building structure, we decided to use lightweight construction to save construction time and also to avoid site damage to all those trees. On the ground floor which is a parking space, we choose concrete columns to reduce the damage that might occur from vehicles and floods. Steel beams and columns are used for the rest of the building except for the service building which is more appropriate to use a typical RC structure. Not only steel beams and columns are used, but we also use pre-insulated metal panels for both roof and walls to minimize the masonry works that can damage the site and the trees and for faster construction time.
Working in a good environment is not just relaxing but also makes a better work-life quality. The center court with existing trees connects all the floors together and makes people enjoy walking on the stairs rather than using the elevators and can interact with each other more. Although having a lot of openings is better for natural light but also takes strong glare and heat gain. The position of the opening is very important. We use expanded metal sheet awning over building windows to filter the sunlight according to the sun's direction. We choose a white color that looks clean and simple to contrast with the trees and let the shadows from trees and leaves move around very nicely.
