Water is the first basis element for human life. It has been involved with people for their birth until death. People can not be living without water. For example, almost every main city of any country in the world usually located by the river. The river is the heart of people communities, it is the place for agriculture, transportation, forage, and human settlement. In many culture, river is also getting involved with religious rituals from life to dead.
In Asian culture, obviously seen in India, Ganges River is the holy river. Indian believes that the river has an origin from the mountain of gods. Their river is the place for many religious rituals from birth to death.
In Thailand, many rivers are also the place related to life and death rituals. After the funeral has been finished, the dead body was cremated, the cousins brought to the ash to the river and them to river. They believe that the spirit will return to nature.
In term of architecture, people usually built the house by the river for many reasons. In the past, river bank area was the place for planting, farming, transportation in many countries in the world. From time to time, lifestyle of people has been changed, people are not planting, farming for life also people transport on the road and air rather than water. River turned to be the area for nice scenery in city, the land price by the river getting higher, many hi-end residential and commercial buildings were replaced the old housing.
Meanwhile, man-made water was required to be part of architecture for different reasons such as design for sustainable, decorative design, design for believes or religious.
- Design for sustainable or Eco-design: water has been use in architecture for environment reason. For example, in hot weather countries small pond was designed to locate on the good orientation around the house to reduce heat and creating moisture to the house. In contrast, in cold weather countries, water was designed to reflect sunlight into the buildings to create warm temperature inside.
- Design for decorative: artificial water items were designed to create aesthetic or nice space in the buildings. Water can create softness, smoothness, transparency, reflection, harmonize, natural feeling and etc. to a particular space in the building.
- Design for believes and religious: there are many believes about water in many ethnics or religions. For example, In China, they believe in knowledge called Feng-Shui which is about building design and orientation following wind and water. They believe that better orientation is better health, life and finance.
Not only for buildings or architectures, Chinese also use Feng-Shui Theory for cemetery orientation, they believe that the spirits would have better after-life and their relatives also have better life.
No comments:
Post a Comment