Wat Chak Daeng Community Pavilion

Project Type : Public

Location : Samut Prakan, Thailand

Status : Completed

Wat Chak Daeng Pavilion is a collaborative effort between the temple, neighborhood leaders, and a group of environmentally-conscious donors to provide much-needed public space for the surrounding community, with the underlying mission of highlighting the temple’s decades-long commitment to sustainability.

Per community request, the pavilion is designed to host up to 200 seats and to accommodate a variety of events such as religious ceremonies, weddings, and funerals, while simultaneously providing shaded connections to nearby existing buildings and maintaining an uninterrupted view of the historic crematorium.

With the exception of the structural steel, the project utilizes mainly upcycled materials from the temple’s own waste management program to create a multi-layered and multi-functional roofscape, emulating a tree canopy.

The roof panels (made of compressed milk cartons) are periodically punctuated with translucent panels to allow filtered daylight through the ceiling baffles (made from plastic bottles and agricultural waste) and large clusters of hanging plants.

To help minimize construction costs, major portions of the project are installed by the temple staff and volunteers themselves, with coordination assistance from the general contractor and our team, including the roofing, the ceiling baffles, and the pavers (fabricated within the temple grounds using trash in the concrete mix).

As the steel members are exposed, the entire structure is designed and detailed as a holistic system. Off-grid columns of varying sizes not only accommodate large spans for optimum seating arrangements, but also further enhance the forest-like quality of the structure.

Photography : Thanawatchu