International Program in Design and Architecture (INDA). Faculty of Architecture. Chulalongkorn University Bangkok. BSc year 4 2017-18. Studio Dance of Water.
Project for a residential center for the performing arts on a wetland site beside the Chaopraya river in the north part of Bangkok to meet the needs of a charitable foundation that educates, nurtures and excites interest in dance in Thailand.
Students took inspiration from river history and lore, agriculture, ecology and progressive environmental thinking to advance an architectural intervention with the potential, to precipitate the transformation of the environment of this wetland site. Instead of viewing water inundation as conflicting with human activity, students have seen these both as constructive themes - interdependent but in tension within a single dialectic between architecture and environment. Students have drawn narratives between the arts program of human movement, the changing hydrology of the site and the riverine ebb and flow of the mighty Chaophrya. In this watery environment where at times the boundary between land and river is unclear students explored new ecosystems and adaptive architectural approaches that enrich human occupation.
Clockwise. Jira Suksomboonwong, Massakorn Boonpithak, Vitoon Roshom, Siriwanee Phonsen
INDA BSc year 4 2018-19. Studio My Family
Families have been the elemental collective unit of societies for as long as is recorded, and tribal groups, extended families and nuclear families have evolved to provide economic security, social protection, reproduction and happiness. Thai family systems have been deeply influenced by rituals of Confucianism and the principle of filial piety or patriarchial control over family matters including marriage and patrilocal - or co-residence. Decreasing birth rate, increasing longevity, rural to urban migration, greater participation of women in workforce and changing priorities among the young are diversifying household typologies - with increasing small and one parent families, skip generation and couples without children. The basis of these new multigenerational households is the mutual exchange of emotional and financial support between younger and older members - the traditional paradigm built on filial piety is shifting from parental needs to mutual needs in more cooperative living arrangements.
Students imagined cooperative habitation milieu outside the model of the family home – new collaborative, collective living arrangements that recognize the many emerging types and compositions of households and expand accepted understandings of the term “family”.
Clockwise. Chanai Chaitaneeyachat, Chanai Chaitaneeyachat, Te Chanin, Mohamed Benmlih
INDA BSc year 4 2019-20. Studio Bombay Spires
The studio questioned reigning urban ideologies of social secession and asymmetry in cities and re-imagined the urban typology of the mixed-use high-rise in the context of India’s most global and cosmopolitan city – Mumbai.
Mumbai has been growing for 500 years and has an economic vitality and cultural diversity that nurtures enterprise in the arts, theatre, literature, music and films, but it is a city of striking socio-economic polarity. The growing elite in the city are enamored by emerging global visions of prosperity and connectivity, while the poor majority cling onto the historical promise of Bombay/Mumbai as the city of the working classes.
The studio argues that vertical architecture cannot be separated from the permeable fabric of the city and from the public activity from which it grows:
What new practices of domestic and collective use can vertical living and working catalyse?
What are the possibilities of harmonious life in vertical urban forms – what solidarities and collective groups can emerge?
How do towers participate in or reveal urban location choices. How can they contribute to economic interaction?
How can verticalization be squared with ‘citiness’ and objectives of incremental development?
Working through these design frames students constructed spatial structures with equitable programs of uses that balance and intensify urban life and recognize informal and unexpected social networks and patterns of use.
Clockwise. All Caroline Audric
INDA BSc year 4 2019-20. Studio Yangon Rehab
The studio studied architectural preservation – a broadening field of contemporary practice that reinvests buildings of the past with cultural currency. Through the semester students grew understanding, incorporated new knowledge and developed their own intellectual frameworks in this field through a historic building project of preservation, restoration, adaption, addition/elimination, and re-purposing in Yangon, Myanmar.
Every object that man creates is destined to decay, and preservation seeks to freeze or reverse and signify ephemeral aspects of human productivity through restoring, renovating and supplementing historic artifacts. The work of preservation involves understanding the layered narrative of buildings and can confront history and illuminate erased or forgotten moments. The studio questioned if human engagement is perhaps more significant than physical fabric - the people a building has inspired and their systems of social relations. Student projects positioned preservation as a mediator, where architectural intervention can offer new readings of the past through a lens of cultural currency.
Clockwise. Buncharin Eua-arporn, Buncharin Eua-arporn, Pimboon Wongmesak, Pimboon Wongmesak
INDA BSc year 4 2020-21. Studio Open Health
The studio challenged reigning models of health architecture and questioned resilience and responsiveness to change. In the spirit of Eco’s “work in movement”, Archigram’s canon of “indeterminacy” and Richard Llewelyn’s “endless (hospital) architecture”, we argued a future oriented architecture of health that is adaptive and open ended.
Healthcare buildings have conventionally been shaped by highly complex and prescriptive clinical and techno- environmental programs best accommodated through large centralized institutions. But care and treatment modalities are continually evolving with present emphasis on translational medicine that enables community based (primary care) platforms and distributed models for even the most advanced practices. The covid-19 pandemic has glaringly illuminated the need for more resilient architectural models that can adapt quickly to shifts in delivery mechanisms, technologies and clinical advances. If hospitals mirror in form and function the collective understanding of human well-being what will hospitals of the future look like? The studio probed and speculated a healthcare architecture that is not conclusive but open to possibilities. The selected riverside site was an evocative place for our ideas, and students were free to incorporate or remove completely the few existing structures and were required to cross-breed architectural creativity, scientific precision and functional and technical requirements in their approach. We obtained specialist knowledge through workshops with healthcare architects, and gained insights from architectural psychologists in order to understand how health environments can be designed to be curative in and of themselves.
Clockwise. Fay Saruta Sookparkob, Nink Phurichya Jirayutat, Mim Nicharee Sammapan, Nink Phurichya Jirayutat, Mim Nicharee Sammapan
INDA BSc year 4 2020-21. Studio City Lobby
The studio questioned conventional hotel typologies in the context of current conversations around otherness, the openness of city spaces - and hospitality, and envisaged a more civic purpose for the city hotel.
With strange geographies of open, closed and negotiable spaces offering opportunities for anonymity, ambiguity.…and transgression, hotels are alluring, liminal spaces of departure and encounter outside the ordinary of our everyday lives. Hotels open themselves to the stranger, embracing the risk of the other - of people, actions and ideas that are different, unfamiliar or unknown. The hotel is a social phenomenon which is so much more than simply an operational entity
But as urban interventions, city hotels (particularly those of large international chains) can be seen as exclusionary enclaves of privatised public space - transient places that stand in contrast to the settling stationariness of established city neighbourhoods and our home dwellings. The studio has grappled to draw together objectives of urban embedment and human desires for escape, and speculated how a city hotel can redraw the contours of public and private space through new thresholds of departure and encounter for travellers, staff and host communities alike.
Clockwise. Jeen Sasipa Punkasem, Jeen Sasipa Punkasem, Earn Chayanisa Ongarjphanchai, Earn Chayanisa Ongarjphanchai, Max Prin Parinyanusorn, Max Prin Parinyanusorn
