 I'm very excited to introduce Ratchaporn Chuchui as the first speaker in the arguments 2023 summer lecture series. Ratchaporn has come to us from Bangkok, where she is the director of All Zone, an internationally recognized and celebrated design practice working at the vanguard of architecture today. Ratchaporn was born in Bangkok and received her bachelor's of architecture from Chulalongkorn University and her master's of science in advanced architectural design at Columbia University. So welcome back to the AAD. She also completed her PhD in architectural history at the University of Tokyo in 2002. From 2002 to 2022, Ratchaporn taught as a member of the faculty of architecture at Chulalongkorn. And in the past year, she has led studios on the design of affordable housing prototypes at the Yale School of Architecture as the Louis Kahn Visiting Professor. And this is also the subject of All Zone's most recent work. Since co-founding All Zone in 2009, Ratchaporn has received a number of important commissions and awards. In 2016, All Zone completed the Mayan Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, which was subsequently awarded the Best New Museum Award of Asia Pacific in 2017 and is the first contemporary art museum in Thailand. In the fall of 2022, All Zone completed the prestigious M Pavilion in Melbourne, Australia. Alongside her built work in Thailand and abroad, Ratchaporn has also participated in numerous international exhibitions, including at the Guggenheim Museum, the Vitre Design Museum, the Milan Triennale, the Ichigo Sumari Art Triennial, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, La Casa and Sendida in Madrid, and at the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial of 2015, where she presented the speculative film Lighthouse, which we watched today. And this is also where I first encountered your work and All Zone. While the architecture of All Zone encompasses the scale of chairs that resemble flying beetles, converted shop houses, and infrastructural interventions for urban markets, it is united by what Ratchaporn has called a casual sensibility as well as an experimental quality of lightness and informality. And while the All of All Zone suggests a project of radical inclusion, the zone of All Zone situates this openness within the parentheses of specific climatic regions. Above all, that of Bangkok, where Ratchaporn's keen observations of the city and its transformations in the last 20 years have led to a distinct body of work. When I first encountered Lighthouse among a crowd of very heavy kind of one-to-one models of alternative housing in the Chicago Cultural Center, I remember feeling transported to another place and time through this light and tender projection. So I'm very happy to have another occasion to take this trip with you all and with Ratchaporn. And please join me in welcoming her for her talk, fragile wall. Thank you, Sam, for just a complete introduction. I wouldn't be able to do it myself. Thank you very much for having me here today. It's very honor and a little bit nervous because to be back home, I was in the AAD program long time ago and I still remember the first week of AAD was really exciting, eye-opening, confusing and everything else. But I can guarantee all of you that every minute in the program is really worth it. It's the most intensive moment in my life, actually. I can tell. Okay, so today I would like to share with you the works as an extension of the film that I hope you watched this morning. When I learned about this arguments series which was not like this when I was a student, I thought that since I was the first one who started it, I want you to get in touch with something tangible. I didn't want you to read a lot of texts the first week, my goodness, no way. So I just chose the film and today I'm gonna explain a little bit further the background of my practice, how my practice participates in the context where I operate. I actually divide the issue into four issues. The first one is on the streets. In the past 17 years, Thailand has been in constant political dramas. Demonstration on the streets are very common, everyone protests from very left to very right, from very old to very young, from poor to rich, everyone was on the street. So it was kind of amazing that we have such a conflict. And with several coups and military control, actually right now the country is one of the most unequal in the world. 1% of the population control 69% of the country's wealth. So it was really amazing on this. Few weeks ago we had a general election. It's really like the very bright light at the tunnel. It is a historical victory for the liberal parties, but we believe that the real democracy is still a long way to go. Political turmoil on the street will be seen more in the future, I assume. But why I talk about this? During all this political demonstration in the past almost two decades, some of this demonstration occupy the middle of the city, occupy the streets some for several months. And it was really interesting for me to observe how people really leave on this very horse-tied situation on the streets. In this photo, the parts of the street occupation become an open-air market during the day where people joyfully doing shopping or the gadgets for the demonstration. It was kind of like everyone ran there to get the best t-shirt. And sometimes there were a lot of concerts and people would just went there to listen to their favorite singers. Sometimes there's a food massage, service while you're waiting, and people really enjoy. I was quite amazed. I always went there because it's just fun to see. Food is always a big thing in Thailand. The whole family could come and set up their kitchen right in the middle of the street. When they have to stay for like months, this is how they leave. They just put up a tent with mosquito nets and really leave on the streets like this. And they just feel so comfortable. This was really amazing to me and it showed me that in tropical climates, the built environment could be very thin and light. In 2012, we were commissioned to do an art installation in a farm outside Bangkok. We told the curator that we are not an artist. We don't know how to do art, but we are architects. She said do whatever you want, don't argue. So we have to find some kind of space where we want to work with and to improve it. So we found this little wood where they wanted people to go for a picnic, but not so many people would go because it looks a little bit rough. So what we thought is how do we improve the space? How we allow people to go there with some kind of joyful and fun environment. So we made, and also not to mention that the budget was very tiny. So we have to work with something very cheap and light. And so we made these fabric sculptures as the lightest form of elements to improve the space. We filled the wood with this. And actually we did several experiments using traditional paper cuttings at starting points, trying to find the best shape to react to bed with the breeze and finally we found it. This exercise was very short exercise but it really helped us to define quality of architecture we would like to work on, which is something very minimum substance, light, thin, full of joy and related to the place and its crops if possible. And of course it should be something very adaptive to the environment. This is the first issue. The next one is under the sun. In the light form of architecture, I just show you, could sustain just a strong sunlight and heat because it's already under the shade, either trees or a roof. In the tropical climates, during the day, we are always looking for a place where it is shaded. I was always trying to find a shaded place to walk even on the street, just now when I was coming here. Like everyone else was under the sun. In an informal setting, just as a motorbike taxi stand in the city, it is as simple as putting up bunches of umbrellas with a seat thing, and this is already comfortable. Or even a temporary market with a lot of umbrellas, and this is not unique, it's pretty much everywhere. But in a bigger and more permanent setup, such as the market or restaurant, they would put up a tent. And it was supposed to stay for like a few days, but some of them could last for like 10 years or even more. So this is like a general environment in the city where people have lunch and dinner in this kind of tent. So you can imagine that a tent rental business is very big here in Thailand. Basically the livelihoods of the city, the life outdoors is generated by different types of shapes here. You can see with the trees, with the smaller tent, with the big tent. And recently I just found this shade, the roof in the temple. The roof is with wheels, so it can go anywhere where the car is parked. So it was like genius, like eye-opening. So why not? If you can move an umbrella, why not the roof? And we start all this research on how to shade because we had to decide an open eye market in the suburb of Bangkok. And it's not the, it's not a kind of building that usually they hire an architect, usually they just build. But then the client wanted to make it nice, so we jumped in. Basically it is a mix of different types of shedding device from umbrellas, fabric roofs and metal roof. The typology of each roof actually comes from how formal and permanent the business is. As you can imagine, a very formal, sorry, a very informal, it's just an umbrella with a movable stall. This is the most profitable that they get the money. And why a convenience store of a global brand like 7-Eleven has a metal roof with air-conditioned space and there are many types of business in between all these two. So the building is rather open and has to be adaptive to accommodate to this dynamic of formality or informality, it depends on how you look at it. So we just met different types of groups and make it to bring hygiene, safety and security and all that. And this is during the night, it's like up the supper and it became a kind of point of reference in the middle of nowhere neighborhood and they just finally the move the bus stop in front of the market, which is good. We took the idea of the shade a little bit further. This project is a shade for a music festival that lasts only five days. And it called Wonderfruits and the event focuses on, they call it creative sustainability. So we propose a room that is very light, relocatable and reusable. The structure, the vertical structure it's still column with individual foundation so it can rearrange in different form. The room, the fabric roof is in the form of Waffle that it can cast a shade but allow us to see the sky through. So not to mention that Waffle structure helped the fabric to get a bit stronger. The fabric itself is a cheap translucent polyester insert with off-cut silt to create some thicker shade in some area and we just hang loosely these 15 pieces of eight meter by eight meter and let the forces keep the form without much of the tension. The roof was finally dismantled after five days and it was actually reinstalled in many locations already in the past five years. Another experiment we did is this almost invisible roof for a small active street during bankrupt decide week. We propose to have a permanent steel structure at a platform where the light fabric group can be shamed every year during the decide week so they can commission a new designer every year. So we were the first one. So the idea is we just want to make something very invisible just like when the cloud is there and you have a kind of shaded space. So people can walk through the alley during the day nicely and the material is plastic mosquito net pleated with a lot of cable ties. The pattern creates different thickness of the shades. If we untie all the cables, we get back to the original piece of fabric so we can even change the pattern upon a different context. I mean if we wanted. So you can see here that our roof, these fabric roofs is working together with other types of shades like umbrellas, trees, and even the metal roof cantilever from the wall. Our next shade is more permanent. It is in the courtyard of Shata Architecture Triennial Buildings in the UAE. We were commissioned to do some kind of intervention during the first Shata Architecture Triennial curated by Adriela Hood. We went there because I really had no idea what Shata was. So I couldn't do anything. So I just went. Stupid me, it was in August. My God, it was so hot. And I was the only one walking on the street. No one else there. In Shata, everyone is in air conditioning space either in the building or in a car because the temperature difference between the interior and the exterior was so much that when you move from air conditioning space to the outside, you could die really. I did and it was really shocking. And the newly built buildings are getting even bigger and bigger so you never really leave air conditioning space. People told me that when they go abroad they don't even turn off the air conditioner because it would make the house so humid. So that was another shocking thing that I learned. So what we propose is that we want to address this issue of the overuse of air condition and propose a very, very tiny intervention to show that we can reduce the use of air conditioning by creating a kind of transitional space between the interior and exterior. So when you go out from air conditioning place, you don't get this shock of different temperature. So we made perforated roof that create the shade during the day and this perforated roof would release the heat from the ground to the sky during the night. So this is actually the principles of hot, dry climate architecture. And we had a very short time to work on the project. Adrian told us three months before the opening so we couldn't find anyone to make it for us so we bought a sewing machine and we made it in our studio. We learned how to sew everything and we didn't even have time to ship because it would take too long and too expensive so we carried them with us on the plane. It required six of us to grow to have enough weight for the roof. So that was quite also fun. And this is so you can see here how the space, the light is different when the roof is installed with the roof and without the roof. And the angle of the waffle is decided to match the angle of the sun in this precise location. Thanks for all this digital calculation. We could do it easily. As soon as the roof was set up, people just came in because of course it's not as hot so they really like it. And we thought it was quite a nice gesture that everyone came here. You can see that the quality of light is different from a normal roof because usually if you put normal opaque roof it's completely dark and the space is not that welcome. But in this case, this fabric roof gives quite a shade but at the same time, it's not very dark. And this is from the upper level, you see this roof. Last year we were commissioned to decide Improvillian in Melbourne. The Improvillian is something very similar to Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London but the main difference is that Improvillian houses all kinds of summer program. So the space has to be flexible enough to house all those programs starting from like tour, concert, workshop, dance and whatever you can imagine. In our season, 2020 to 2023, they ran more than 300 events. The difference of this roof in comparison to what we did before was that this one actually required a rent proof. The one before like in Sharjah, we don't need a rent proof of course. And this one it has to be rent proof because of the program and very capricious weather in Melbourne, it could rain 20 minutes and sun and rain again. So that's how it is. We start to work on this project in October 2021. By then we just got out from a long lockdown and the peak of COVID. So we thought that the pavilion should be a place where people remit again in public. We don't want to be in a room anymore. It should be something very welcome, very fun, very joyful. It's like being under the trees with leaves and it's moving a little bit and so on. So to celebrate the life in public again, Melbourne actually has the longest lockdown in the world. So we thought that this idea would make sense. After a long workshops and collaborations with the team, we came up with these three layers of proof. The each layer was doing different things because we tried to have very simple one layer. It didn't work. The material wouldn't, no material would actually do that. The top most is to give very nice profile that the pavilion could be seen from far away. It's made out of fishing net, which is manufactured especially for the pavilion. Then the middle layer to withstand the rains and transparent enough to allow the light to go through is made out of STFE material that is a translucent fabric that made as a kind of substitution of glass because it's much lighter and it's easier to install. It gives like 50% transparency. And then the lowest layer, we work again with the waffle because it could create a movement and could have a very nice quality of light. It's made out of an exterior blind. Again, this waffle is very complex than before. We did a lot of mock-up because we learned that no digital model could actually imitate how fabric would behave. So like every single piece, we have to make one to one or one to 10 scale model. And here it is, the pavilion during the day and this is during the night. We met the light that it could be a kind of extra moment to show a very complex engineering works inside. And this is one of the events under the roof. The events of 300 of the last year in the Instagram, the season ended last April. Now we are moving the pavilion to another location in the city to remain for the next 20 years. The third issue I like to address is about obsolete. In the city, especially Bangkok, there are many abandoned structures. Some are unfinished, some are not in use. They perhaps are obsolete because of the recent lifestyle. They don't meet contemporary business models. Running them or remodeling them could cause a fortune. So this actually pose a question of how we architects should think about a life of building right now because we thought that when we build something it should remain for a long time. But given our lifestyle recently, everything changed so fast. Something that we thought could be last, but it didn't. This is a shopping mall in Bangkok that is abandoned for the past almost 20 years. Many unfinished structure also are occupied by homeless people. And they are very organized community, a complex situation where they even grow vegetables and raise chickens and so on. So this inspires a lot of the project of Lighthouse you just saw in the film. We try to understand how we would be able to take advantage of all these abandoned structure and at the same time, if the structure is there it's an opportunity to imagine a built environment that could build with very light material. And we try to think that this light material could be casually modified. Nothing would be in the stage of permanence as our life is not permanent, it's changing all the time. Why not architecture? So it is something in between architecture and insulation. So, but what is the boundary between the two anyway? The project of this Lighthouse, it's built for young professionals as you see in the film in a tropical metropolis. In this case, Bangkok. These people cannot afford to live properly in a normal apartment. The house is a kind of incubation space for them during their early year of their careers. Perhaps when they earn more money they can move out. It could be a place, this house could be placed in an abandoned structure already with groups and some water and electricity facilities. Many of them could be together and become a big community. That's what we envision. We use very cheap metal grid panels usually used for a street vendor as a main structure. And the size of the house is 2 by 4 by 4.8 meter, 2 meter high. It can fit within one parking space and it costs around 1,000 US dollar. It would take four to five hours to set up with two people. When you dismantle this house, it can be carried in one pickup truck easily. Apart from the metal grid panel, we wrap the house with mosquito net. So the diffuse quality of light you see here and also in the film is from the mosquito net. Debate and the changing rooms are defined by a bigger fabric for more privacy. We found this abandoned 20 story hotel in the heart of Bangkok. Three meters from a subway station, the hotel has a parking structure that could house around 200 cars. It was partly rented out for people in the area. So we set up the two units at our prototype in the parking structure for a week and then we had people living there for some days, people in my office of course. They were forced to live there. But they enjoyed. You can see, you could see from the film. And we met this film that is something in between a documentary and a fiction, how to live in just a space. And the film was our participation in the Chicago Biennial as Sam just mentioned. And the film was also acquired as a permanent collection for the art in the city of Chicago. And this is during the day and some close up detail. All these, the panels and mosquito nets are attached together by a plastic cable ties. So you can cut, you can reinstall easily. So the thickness of the wall also became furniture. I kind of built in furnitures. The interior space here. We did a prototype again in 2018 at the garage of our building in Bangkok for Bangkok this side week. And we had a party. During the day, it was a public exhibition. During the night, we rented out as a hostel where Airbnb. I was so fun because people came to live there and they used the toilet in our building. So it's so much fun to see the reaction of the people. So this is at the opening, we had a party and this is how we decorate the interior for them to live. We put also the fan at night. The third prototype was built for Asia-Cosmic Rebellion in Japan in 2018. This time, we did it half size because the theme of the exhibition was a small space. So we put some furniture also outside the house. And it was really flood with the strong summers alike in Japan. We are often asked if we think that this like house is a real house or it's just a serious toy for us. What about privacy? It is strong enough. Can people really live there? Maybe when you watch the film, you had the same corrections. We can discuss later. Of course, we really think so. We think it is a serious house. But we cannot be so sure. People will decide if it makes sense to live like this. They can take some ideas and abandon the others. We could only inspire them and also learn from them when they take all these ideas. The abandoned typologies in the center of the city is not really limited to big buildings. Shop house is the most common form of urbanization in Southeast Asia. The typology organized in the way that the ground floor is a commercial space and people would live on the upper floor. So it's vertical organization. It is a narrow slide of land, four meter, by 12 to 15 meters in general. Before the invention of department store and shopping malls, more sub-commercial activities happening in these shop houses and of course market. Then because of traffic jam, parking on the street is difficult, these shop houses began to die. Many of them are abandoned or rarely used. 15 years ago, it was really like nobody cares about shop house, it was very unfashionable. In 2008, I began my practice as an architect, which I didn't intend to. This is a long story, we can talk about this later if we have time. I had to find a place to live in the city. But as a middle class as I am, I couldn't afford to buy a newly built apartment because it was too expensive, all this new condo. But I wanted to live in the city because as you might have already heard, Bangkok is really a traffic place. It's always traffic jam, even until midnight. So I was looking around to find a solution and I found that nobody cares about shop houses and it was so cheap compared to the property of newly built condo in the same area. So with the support of my family, I found these two shop houses in the middle of the city, in a very nice area. Now it became very hip, too hip perhaps. And this is the condition when we arrived and the next photo was after we transformed it. Actually what we did is that we freed a ground level for complete accessibility so that every floor we can get different tenants. So it could be also parking and in case of floods, the ground floor is safe. We teared out the front and the back wall for maximum sunlight and transform each level into a living studio so we can rent out each level. And we extend the front and the back of the building this green area here. As a kind of breathing space, it's an outdoor room for service and plans and also if you want to stay outside. We add a steel frame to hold the facade. The facade is made out of the cheapest material, again it's ventilation blocks, playing with different patterns, different privacy. At the beginning we wanted to play with colors. We actually, there's a color we show us, but we already painted it, but the sun was so strong that it reflects the color into the interior space too much so we had to grayscale all the facades. And the block is perfect to fulfill the direct sunlight. It's very lighted but never have a direct sunlight. And also it's very good for security in the middle of Bangkok. The break-in is quite common as well. So this is the space in between indoor and outdoor where we put some greenery. I use one floor as our office and we use this space for the material testing in the sunlight. Sometimes people are going out to smoke in this area or they talk on the phone when they don't want to disturb anyone. This is the office. And we use two floors as an office and we rent out one floor and I live on the top floor even until now. So this is our first building, first architecture work that I did. And on the financial side, it's the cost of buying, transformation per square meter. It's actually less than half of the price of a newly built condor in the same area. So I could prove to my family that studying architecture is not that bad. It makes some kind of sense. So we moved in 2009 and we're still there now. But what we didn't expect at all was our neighbors. In this little alley, there were like 15 shophouses together. After we finished, our neighbor thought it was great and they started to do the same in different degrees. And after, let's say almost 10 years, every single unit was refurbished. Not to mention that I was living in a street where construction was going on for a long time. So it was kind of noisy. And a few years ago, we got together the whole street and we put some money to repair the street and the drainage system because the street is private. So we could say that with our small initiative, we generate a kind of tiny urban revitalization in the area. And right after our first shophouse transformation was published, many people called, asked to visit there, called for advisors. Some asked us to transform their shophouses. Of course, we did many of them. We also gave many interviews, including the financial size of the project. So little by little, shophouse transformation became very common. In Thailand, with different programs, and now it is very fashionable to live in a shophouse in a cool area. If you Google shophouse transformation in Thai, like it would come out like this, from a very simple DIY type to a very sophisticated, designed by renowned architects in the city. In this, we cannot say that we were the first one to do shophouse transformation, but I think perhaps we were the one that made it kind of sexy enough so that people wanted to do the same. So little by little, all these abandoned buildings now are in use. Because of all this, now we are working with the Bangkok Metropolitan Government to transform some of the abandoned shophouses into a first shopper housing. And the project just started last year. With minimum transformations, repartition, we proposed a kind of mixed organization of how to live and work. And we reorganized the whole circulation of the building to meet building regulations. And the most difficult thing would be to organize the ownership of these verticals-like divisions. So it's not very easy, but we are working on it now. And the level of construction would allow us flexibility and transformation in the future. The last thing I want to discuss with you is threats. New York Times gave a prediction of how climate change would affect flattings in the city of Bangkok. This one was like the first prediction, and then the second prediction was much worse. So basically the whole Bangkok would be underwater, but not all the time, occasionally. It was not so surprised. Bangkok is situated on a flood plain. Every few decades, without a threat from global warming, it gets a big flood. This one was in 2011. And the suburb was, the city was really underwater. This is like the suburb. They live really in this water for really a long time. This is really the level of water that people live for months. But life went on. So people kind of struggled to find a way to commute because it was impossible for cars to go around. The highway became the biggest parking structure. People were afraid that their car would be underwater. So they moved the car to park on the highway. So the highway was not in use for a long time as well. And this is few months ago. This is a condition that could happen after a big rain. And it will be more and more common. Another threat is urban housing. Housing for low income population is always a problem. In formal settlement like this in the city, it's not a problem, but actually it's a quick answer. It's a quick solution, but it's not a good solution yet. With this condition and density, when COVID-19 hit, the population living here was the most effect and vulnerable. Houses are so close without much ventilation. The street, the alley, is not even two meter wide upon the WHO distance that we should be apart. And most of them is a one-room typology. Some will share toilets and kitchens. So when one member of the family got COVID, he or she might have to go out, living on the street. We read news that they would even live in a car not to harm the rest of the family. During the peak of COVID in 2021, we had a chance to work with the School of Public Health, Mahidon University in Bangkok. They found that COVID spreader in big public hospital in the city didn't come from the patients, but came from the staff who live in this kind of low-income settlement nearby. So that was devastating because they had to close like 70% of the hospital. So we did a survey in one of these informal settlement nearby a big hospital, hoping that we could improve the quality of living, but we were wrong. Nothing wouldn't help that much. Actually, a more serious solution is required. So, but if we wait for a grand scheme for public housing, it could take years or even decades. With recurring pandemic tendency, it would be surely too late. So we made a proposal, we call it a kind of midterm solution that if we keep the number of the house, but stack them into like four, five-story building, ventilation sunlight would be achieved easily. And these buildings are small scale construction. They could build easily and they don't need to build the whole thing at once. They could build one by one. And we present this to the public housing authority, but nothing moving on yet. And the first two level would be commercial and common facility. The upper three levels are residential. One unit that could host three, four people together is four by eight meter with the cantilever space of 1.5 meter around as a kind of buffer space. This space is where service and extension could happen. So a small quarantine space could be built here. We had a chance to build a one-to-one scale model of the project as our participation of the exhibition, Wonderful Critters, curated by Yuan here. And in La Casa Incendida in Madrid last year, it was super exciting experience that finally we can do like this one-to-one to prove that this space is kind of liveable. This is at the exhibition. So we have to work on this more. The last thing I am sharing with you, it's an affordable housing in the south of Bangkok with a private developer, where we try to deal with the imminent climate crisis. The project started just right before COVID. So we had like two years during COVID to work very slowly in details. The cheap housing, the key issue of cheap housing is the land. So usually all this housing would be in the suburb, whereas the low land around. So that cheap land could reduce the price a lot, but at the same time it is a kind of flat prone area. You can see from here that there's already a lot of water. And we imagine that within a short-term flooding, people can still live here easily. We completely free the ground level, which is for the commercial like housing. This is very unusual. We try to imagine that it's very similar to traditional house on slits in the region that they would elevate everything up from the ground, not only for the floods, but also for humidity. We clad the facade with ventilation blocks, of course, because it's the cheapest that could help to shape the sun and to allow the ventilation using very minimum air condition. We work a lot on these ventilation blocks, also on the manufacturer beds. We convince the client that it is cheaper that they set up a factory to produce it and actually it's much cheaper. So they set up the factory themselves to make it, and also they can control the production. So this is the variation of the blocks. Not only for the block, but we convince the client to build one-to-one scale mockup because it's during COVID, nothing much going on. So we had to do something. And we said that you will build 333 units. Why don't we make one to understand all the details so that we can reduce the cost of construction? So that's how we managed to make the cost-cutting. And the first 15 units were completed last December and it was sold out right away. Another 48 were completed in April. I don't know if they're sold out yet, but they're keeping building and selling at the same time. So this is some of the interior space. We try to use the natural light as much as possible to reduce the electricity usage during the day. People already move in. We are very excited to see how they will use and modify the space. In a few years, I wish I could have a chance to update how everything is transformed with you. I hope I have shared with you enough what we do architecture in response to the context where we operate. And in the conditions where we have this constant change of everything like what we are now. One way to handle it, I think, is to make everything light. The house has to be light and the wall could be very fragile so that we can manipulate and change them upon the condition easily. Before ending, I would like to emphasize that what I show you today are not my work alone. They are the results of millions collaborations, especially people who have worked and are working with me at all zones. I have to credit them a lot because they have spent numerous of hours, day and night, sometimes very late, as you might imagine. I have to thank them for making all this happen. And actually, also, I want to thank you all very much for your time and it's really a pleasure to share all this with you. I look forward to hearing the conversation after this. Thank you. I noticed as the talk went on, the walls became less and less fragile in the beginning. I know it was not in a strict chronology, but in the beginning, there were roofs without walls, just pure ceilings. And then we get these sort of diaphanous walls around the lighthouse and then eventually in the work you're doing now with this affordable housing developer, they're literally concretized in these blocks. And so I'm wondering whether that speaks to a kind of natural development of your practice that as you engage more and more in the kind of concrete conditions of building in Bangkok is the, are walls reasserting themselves in your work or do you have a longstanding kind of antipathy towards the solid and the okay? No, if I could choose, I would make everything fabric. But I cannot do this yet. I would dream of a material that is kind of light but strong enough to wrap the buildings that could breathe. But at the same time, make people feel safe to be in. For the time being, especially with affordable housing, cheap housing, concrete is still the most convenient materials, even though we all know that it's not the most sustainable. But in the context where we are building with very low-skill libraries, this is still the most convenient, I would say. Is that a question? All right, thanks so much for sharing with us your amazing work, really provocative. One image that struck me was the bicycle on the slab with the luminous housing. And it reminded me of a piece I wrote for a bracket where it was about squatting in the Netherlands and how for 30 years, the government allowed this kind of radical experimentation in different spaces and it brought to the forefront a lot of controversial issues in terms of housing, who owns what and how to deal with all these complexities. And so in many ways I think housing is so personal for everyone, it begins very emotional and very charged, like in New York City, a lot of the battles and controversies you see are about housing. Like every little issue becomes so... Big thing. Yeah, so critically charged and important. And so I was just wondering, like you sort of preface this, but in terms of the response of those proposals and in terms of the viability and things like that, I was just wondering what kind of responses you got and is it just a different context in Thailand that allowed you to have more flexibility and more kind of openness to that kind of work? I remember in Chicago, during the Bayano, it was in the room where the film was playing on and on and there was this security guy who was always there. I think he was, he watched it like a million times. On the last day before I left, I went there and I just thanked him. And he said, can I ask you something? Okay, he said that this is your work, right? He said that really, can people live like this? And I was quite impressed by the question and I asked, why do you think people cannot live like this? He said, it's nice, but isn't it cold? Because in Chicago, this would be impossible, right? And he said, isn't it cold? I said, no, Bangkok is always too hot. This is even too much. Without walls at all, it would be more actually appropriate. And he was very impressed and he kept asking about can you keep things, people would steal? And I said, I don't know, this is just a proposal. Maybe people will modify this after they leave, like they modify their house. Like usually people would modify a house even when an architect decide for them, right? So I assume that people should be able to modify, especially in this case, everything is so light you can kind of put up things easily. That's one response that I got from Chicago. And many people question privacy. Of course, it's kind of life in this play, right? Because you could say, you could see from the film. But idea of privacy is very subjective, I would say. If you want to have more privacy, you cover more. If you don't want, you just cover less. And at the same time, I think we right now in our modern society, we are very concerned about privacy. Like we want to have our room, our bedroom, our toilets and everything. But this is quite new. If you look at the history of housing, we always share. And it's not surprising that you always read all these news that people die alone in the house and nobody knows for like months. So I'm not saying that what we did was the solution. But it's more on the question, so how we deal with all this issue. Do we need that much privacy for real? Or how we balance all this issue of privacy? And this is what also the studio at Yale we did last fall was also a lot on this. How much we can share? What is the privacy? What is the individual so-called unit? Or there is no unit at all. So I think we shouldn't see like how we did as a kind of an answer, but it's more a question. I hope that it's more like a question to make people really think and perhaps help to shape different answer or solutions. Yeah, I mean, I think you were showing how people were living in similar circumstances anyways. And then that is almost being like an expression, not just a solution, but somehow an expression of society. Or that was one of the outcomes of the squatting. It was used to protest development. It would actually stop development and make changes or challenge different ways of living and things like that. But I think that leads to my next question a little bit about this realm of possibility or impossibility of building. A lot of times we see architects from different parts of the world doing really amazing works that are only possible because of certain things. Like you don't have all the same rules. You don't have like guardrails in certain countries and whatnot. And so when I see a lot of your work that's like floating and open and light, you know, it's like, oh, I wish we could do some of that thing, some of those things here, you know, where it's not the same climate and whatnot. So I'm just curious about like moving forwards. Do you see how like some of those things could translate in other regions? Or, you know, it's almost like questioning the entire history of modernism and air conditioning and, you know, this idea that, you know, you're using fabrics and other materials like instead of glass, you know, which glass has been sort of like the hallmark of modernism in terms of unsustainability and, you know, all these other issues. So, yeah, I'm wondering like how you see your really provocative light and airy work being able, maybe it's sort of like what Samuel was saying, like how that part is like seen in some of the other works. And then in the housing it becomes this like concrete block. More solid. Right, but do you see like a way for that to translate to other ways of thinking? I think first of all, I'm not anti-modernism. It has a great, a lot of great qualities on many things. But I believe that architecture is really regionalism. It's really localized. You cannot use one solution to all. That's one thing of modernism that I'm not really convinced. So the light constructions that we're trying to explore, to make it lighter and lighter, I think it would make sense only in specific climatic conditions. It wouldn't make sense here in New York. Or it would make sense only in summer. Why in tropical climate it's always summer. Like more or less summer and with rains. So it's going into this direction of how to build lighter and with less substance, we still lack with materials really. When we did the amphibian, at the beginning we were extremely ambitious. We want to use the fabric or materials that it is recycled and like very local to produce, locally produced in Australia and blah, blah, blah. But it didn't exist. Actually we are extremely low tech in materials of building. Especially if we think of all these sustainability, how to build layers and how to reuse the material afterwards. If we want to change the configurations of building, it's really impossible. So architects have very limited resources options of building. Even when we work on the amphibian, we already like, okay, whatever material, whatever fabric we want to use. But in the world there are very few manufacturers who produce fabric for architectures. So that means, I mean, there is fabric that would meet the regulations for building. So that is the limitations. So I would kind of throw back to material science and the construction, the materials, developments and I think you guys could even work on that. We still lack of cool materials to work on. So in, sorry, in like, if we have those kind of more efficient material, probably you can build this in New York. I think. I guess beyond the where is the work of all zone, I wanted to ask relatedly about the horizon of time that you work with because you often described the early work is very ephemeral and temporary, but then you, under the threats section of the talk, you describe these sort of midterm or mean time solutions. So in some ways these seem to bracket or withhold an idea of architecture offering a more permanent response to the threats that you described, but I just wonder like how do you decide when these projects take place and for how long, because the exception to this seems to be lighthouse. Yes, that's it. Where on the one hand it is based on this realist observation of protest architecture, but then it's also a kind of work of science fiction. It could take place at the end of the world, right? It could take place after these that we wonder, you know, why is this parking lot abandoned and what catastrophic event has taken place that now a new architecture has to take root here. So how do you think about time? This is very difficult, isn't it? When we built the building, we wanted to last always. Isn't it? But it's not always the case. And for me it's still the big questions. How strong you make the buildings? And we have a case that we built this small retail space that the client could rent the property, the land for only 10 years. So we like, this is good because when we have this fixed timeframe that within 10 years, this will be gone. So it is easy to understand how we respond to this. But as for other projects, it is a lot more difficult. For the time being, what I could imagine it would be a reflection from, let's say, a shophouse transformation. What remains are the structures, like the slab and all these columns and beams. And then the walls, again, fragile wall, the wall could be transformed. So what I'm trying to do right now, if possible, is to have the wall that is more kind of flexible. But again, you point out that with this housing that we just did, the wall is really concrete. I totally agree on this. But for the time being, it's the cheapest and most kind of perfect solution. But if I could do, I would make it much lighter and allow people to manipulate their own walls in different ways. But maybe the next one. For the time being, it's good. No, no, I'm just imagining how we're gonna go on. Like, how are we gonna go on? Yeah, a good drill. Yeah, it couldn't be a drill, my goodness. Maybe it's a good moment to open up also to, yep. You can wait for the microphones. The microphones will circulate. Hello. So I have a question. Featured in the film, Lighthouse, the demographics shown is mostly young professionals, fridge, looking for a space, affordable space to live when they're starting out in their career. Is this demographic specifically chosen due to their more agreeable view toward co-living? Do you envision this Lighthouse prototype to become a new living typology that is pushed forward and developed by these newer generations of people who are more looking for space that is not secluded in the city lives? Or do you envision the Lighthouse to be just more temporary settlements for people to transition between coming out of college and finding work and then finding a more conventional place to live afterwards after they're more settled down? It depends on them. I mean, if it is for real. I mean, I'm very open. If they want to live for like 10 years, why not? But if they thought it was kind of transitional period, that was our intention that it's just more like an experiment. Some people might like to live like this because they have a lot of friends and it's easy going, I don't know, maybe. But I think as an architect, we cannot be so sure. I think one thing that I try to be aware all the time is that we cannot be so sure of anything we can propose but it depends on how people receive it. They might receive partly, they might not receive at all. They might receive all. I think it depends. So for me, I would like to learn also why they accept something, why they don't accept the others. So that's how I try to operate, especially like I said at the end with the affordable housing that we did, people started to go living there and they start to modify the space. Like we wanted the ground floor to be completely open but there already be walls, some of them. It was interesting but I asked them but you have plenty of space up there. Why do you have to build walls on the ground floor if it's flooding, what happened? And they said, it's the waste of space, we should use it, okay, as you like. So it's interesting how different people respond to the space you provide. Thank you. Hi. Thank you for the lecture today. Oh, it's it, I couldn't see you, okay, thank you. So to continue the discussion, I think you mentioned you don't fully convince by modernism and you think of it as more- Let's say partly convinced. Okay, okay. And you think of it as our originalism and I guess through the design, especially in the lighthouse, you were saying but I really see a lot of premises off early modern architecture such as John Doecker's at the Nassau Centaurium in Dutch. And so the same use of these really light material and also like the color of white, steel and concrete with all of these similarity, could you ever consider the lighthouse as a modern century for, especially for the teenage or for the people that who just got out of college as a place to live in such a compact urban environment, especially in Bangkok today? How to say, like, of course this, it has a modernist sensibility as we are trained as a modernist, of course we cannot escape. I would say that I am more influenced by super studio than the reference you mentioned. I was thinking of super studio as kind of the end of the world conditions and the grid is kind of very strong visual reference as part of the modernism that I think it allows everyone to have, let's say, a better life in the sense that because of all this modern production, we can have better sanitation, we can have better, some of the better living environment compared to, let's say, before this. And what was the question actually, like at the end, you talk about this, you said that I use this, if I reference this. So I was thinking because the Sonastro was sort of like a rehab for the, I think in Dutch land before, it was more or less like a hospital, but then could you ever think of it the like how it would be like a sentry or like a place for people to get relief from like such a compact city environment today? I would love to if it's possible, but we have to work a lot more from this. As I just mentioned, this is a main topic of our studio at Yale last fall. The issue is about informality, how we kind of decide a condition that would create this kind of informalities that people could live in such an environment that they could have a lot of interactions and with very simple and light environment that they are always in constant conversation to modify the environment. So that was, let's say the dreams, let's say the dreams, but I don't know if you could do that, but it's always, dreams is always like halfway achieved and that's I'm aware of. Hi James. And I wanna know what's the government attitude toward these type of housing? Because I mean, with more and more people living in these type of housing and the government will not have enough tax and that will then worsen their economic situation. So I just wanna know what's their attitude? Are they irritated by it or something? You mean like they cannot tax these people? Why not? You have to tax them. I mean, do you mean they're, will they still pay kind of like housing tax? Of course, of course. Basically what we propose in that particular context is that they rent a space of one parking lot, like one parking space and build this lighthouse there. So they have to pay the rent. They have to pay the tax, of course. So what's the government's attitude toward these type of housing? No, no, no, I think for the government this is completely illegal. Completely illegal. They wouldn't allow. But it just, as I say, it's like, fictional still. But as I am trying to work closer to the government, we have to convince them. Like because let's say this building material, like we use these metal grids and mosquito net to wrap the box, right? These wouldn't pass any regulations. Impossible. So it's still a long way to go. But I'm trying to understand how we get there. Our governments are bad. Hi. Was very interesting to see the presentation. Very important work. I think my question would be, you mentioned throughout the presentation, you talked about formal versus informal architecture. And in one of your interviews, I read that while you were studying in Tokyo, you saw how everything is well designed, everything is well engineered, it has a purpose. And how it affects your behavior to the degree where it puts you at unease sometimes. It forces you to behave in a certain way. And in contrast, your work is very experimental and spontaneous. What do you think we miss out and formal architecture and will you put yourself more in the informal architecture? What do we gain on that side of architecture? I remember that I said in the interval that I study in Japan, I love Japanese architecture because it's so well designed. They thought of every single details and sometimes you're scared because you touch this and they knew that you would touch this. So they already decide something that your hand would feel exactly. And it was so impressive. It was so impressive that they imagine every single movement that you would make in a space and they're already there before you arrive. So as an architect designer, that is impressive quality. But it's tense. It's always tense. It's nice, it's beautiful. I go to Japan every year just to perceive all this beauty. But it's not relaxed at all. I don't know. I think we have to find a way to be, if you let everything go on the street as I show, it is impossible. We don't need architects, right? In that case. I think we have to put a little bit more of the quality that you allow people to have their place. If you already decide everything and people will feel that they're just observer, why if you leave some rooms for people to participate into the design itself? I don't know, like you can change this a little bit. So they feel, to me, people feel more at home because they feel that they're part of the space, part of the place. Why, always in Japanese architecture, you are the observer. You are there because they wanted you to move like this, to do like this. But you are not the master of the space. That was, I thought. How do we find middle way? I think you should tell me in some years. Hello, thank you for the great lecture. I really enjoyed the colorful roofs and everything. My question is actually along the lines of what we were just discussing somewhat. Through lighthouse, you've given these really lightweight instruments through which people can define their own variable housing. And again, you've said you would want people to change the environment so they feel like they belong. And in an age where a lot of identities and the crisis and a lot of people feel alienated and they feel like they need to enforce their identity, I think that's really important. But dealing with similar issues, how does one know where to stop? Where does an architect's agency end to define space? And how much room you can give them the agency to define their own space? So say in the example of lighthouse, do you feel like it was enough giving this kit of parts for them to develop their own housing? And if you wanted more agency for yourself in defining that architecture, where would you take it? Wow, that's difficult question. I think this is, again, is the issue that we explore a lot in the studio at Yelp. Where does our job stop? And where does the works of the inhabitants begin? And of course, if you look at it from, let's say, urbanistic point of view, you have urban regulations that you control like some kind of pipes of the building, the colors of the building, the density of the buildings. But then everyone has, every architect who built the building has his or her own design within the building. I was imagining that if we can do architecture in that way in state, but in state of an urban regulation that architects participate in this regulation, if architects are the one who shape the regulations within how to manipulate space and the inhabitants actually are the one who participates in shaping the space. So that could be, for me, interesting. And it is unclear how we're gonna do that and how it's gonna be, where is the threshold, right? But I think it depends on individual condition. Did I answer the question? More or less? So in the light, hi, in the lighthouse, as the number of residents might increase as the lighthouse expanded, the boundaries between public and private are bound to compromise and change, right? So how should architect intervention to be placed in this regard? Well, so I think this is actually what I think I think I just a little bit answered but in the lighthouse, we didn't really work into that yet, but I think the issue you raised is interesting where is the public and private threshold and actually, would it be a threshold or is a kind of gradient quality in between public and private? For now in the city, we have a clear boundary, right? That this is the public and this is a private property. There's a lie in between. But I was imagining that it could be a bit more blur in between the public and the private. If you look at the lighthouse, we kind of try to occupy the space outside the box. Like putting, I don't know, plants and also like hanging clothes. Yeah, I saw people having parties outside their own rooms. The threshold between public and private might not be in my ideas when we did the project. That clear. Okay, yeah, thank you. Hello. Thank you very much for the explanation. It was very interesting to listen to you. I was thinking of the relationship between the lighthouse and technology in two directions. On the one hand, I was thinking of those possible inhabitants unfolding the domestic possibilities of the house through smart technologies. For example, living there with a smartphone could allow you to amplify or dosify your privacy. If you want to understand this house just as something that substitutes a regular house, of course it doesn't work. But if you understand that this is just a transit point, maybe you could meet some people outside in a cafe because you can locate a cafe with your smartphone or you can go and party in another place. I mean that through these smart technologies, we should understand that this house is super connected with the city. And from that point of view, it's very light also in the sense that it's just a transit point, way point, something like that. And on the other hand would be with the infrastructures. Also I was thinking that maybe these light proposals can be lighter and lighter as you want. If they have some hardwares to which connect, which is also very linked to the super studio that you like so much. I mean pipes, electricity installations, maybe some elements are more rigid, more solid, more stable. They are the hardware, let's say. And these other parts you build, they are not the software but the lightware, let me call it that way. So thinking this experiment with the relationship with the technology is very different from thinking this proposal just as a contemporary substitution of a regular domestic proposal. Thank you, that was interesting. Actually one thing I have to mention that it's really impressive and also very fortunate for me because we did this work and everyone is scrutinizing it. It's lovely, it's lovely to hear all these feedback from everyone and it's just an honor really. Thank you, and I think we didn't really think about this kind of technology at all. We thought of this as more like very simple, low technology but what you just addressed could actually bring the project into the next level, really, any questions? Should we take a few at a time? Hello, thank you for the wonderful presentation, by the way. You mentioned de-materialization in your lecture wherein you talk about sparing use of resources. Different economies and different developments have used de-materialization at some point which in turn have caused a radical change in the society's metabolism positively or negatively. So my question is, how do we strategically embrace the concept of de-materialization to navigate the field of architecture? I don't know if it's really like de-materialization but I would say that in my will we should just think of wider possibilities of using materials. I used to work at a big company. That's why I didn't want to become actually actually like a big corporate company and it was very limited. Like they have this kind of palette that you choose from and I always frustrated that we could use like glass, concrete, some panels, timbers. I just wanted to, it's perhaps not exactly de-materializations but the expansion so what could become a material for the environment? Of course when we build in a city, we have to take all kinds of considerations of safety and all that but as again I went back, I'm going back to this issue that we really don't have much options and I encourage everyone to help thinking of what could be a wider possibility of buildings because we don't really have that much material to choose really or if you look at all these fancy new buildings they're like very expensive material and the developments of materials, most of them go into the direction that is like very elaborate but I don't know if we have that luxury anymore. We might need to rethink of more efficiency more efficiency but at the same time less energy consumption, less expensive and it is easily to manipulate and all that so I wouldn't say it is de-materialization, I would say like we should expand the way we think of materials. As I try to use less conventional but of course all of them are illegals in the experiment. Well thank you for your lecture. I haven't noticed any pictures about like taking a long far away from the building or outside the building of the lighthouses especially night, that's supposed to be very beautiful like it can stand for the images like a really real lighthouse lighting up to claim the long lost territory like that. People going back to some place they haven't lived in for a long time but what I really want to ask is that how do you expect these lighthouses to interact with the neighborhood alongside with them whether no matter in the scenery view a way like I mentioned were in the social way like how do you expect them to radiate their existence towards the neighborhood or what part do they play in the society of running? Well it's the housing, usually when you build a house you have problem with neighbors all the time either one house or like a big housing I don't know if any of you have an experience of building a house during a construction you always have a problem right like the neighbor was complained and all that and I would imagine really people would hate it because it's like bunches of young kids living together making noise at night, do you think they like it? I don't think so, so it will be surely some kind of friction between the neighbors and if let's say 200 people living there, right for sure it's like parties all the time, isn't it? So in this kind of situation again you can imagine but then I trust how people dealing with each other so they should find a way to deal with each other Did I answer the question? Not really, I don't know, they should find the answer. Hi, thank you for a wonderful presentation. So lighthouse in terms of materiality seems to be sustainable and also considering it's repurposing an abandoned structure and the target demographic seems to prioritize young professionals as opposed to laborers and this solution also requires minimal labor as if possible this is overshadowing the needs of or minimizing the societal contributions of other Bangkok residents how large of a factor is social sustainability when space and resources are in such limited supply? Well, I wouldn't have a statistic answer to this but I would say that the lighthouse the idea was we discussed this in the office and we really had this problem that some people in our studios who are from, not from Bangkok they couldn't find a proper place to live with the money they got paid from the very beginning of their career so it was kind of natural to come up with this idea but it was not that scientific I would say as an architect we just think that okay let's try to find a kind of proposal and actually she was in the movie the one that had this problem the one who was a friend helping to shelf the staff she was actually the actual person who faced this condition so I wouldn't have a very scientific answer to your questions but we could imagine we could from our experience we could imagine that this is really a real need that people couldn't sustain the life in the city and if they leave the city basically the city laws would lose all these talents and we really need her to work in the office so I try every possible way to have her living in Bangkok even trying to find a house for her to leave and so on so that was kind of direct experience that we had do we have more time? I think we have a little bit of time for maybe three more okay five minutes maybe we could hear the last two or three together thank you for the presentation so my question would be see I feel this is a kind of miserable situation that one in one side that people are this underpaid suffering young age cannot find their place to live in a society in urban and the other side there's a whole working hotel got abandoned so I do appreciate your effort like trying to help the situation from bottom to top to individual to the whole society but what do you think as architects we could do from more micro scape scope how are we gonna impact the society to make the positive impact to let them notice that this is a question do you think what's your invasion like what are you thinking is that decentralizing from the urban that can help to solve this kind of problem or how because there's a strong contrast there that people once I cannot afford it and the other side's a lot of like residents scarcity artificially created by the company trying to maximize their profit so yeah I just wanna know your thoughts from this kind of perspective well so basically okay that we could do the last two okay please please hi thank you for the lecture so my question is do you think it is possible for us to consider these kinds of abandoned buildings as a common pool resource like a CPR and is it possible for people to use these buildings as a CPR in the future and what are the obstacles sorry as a what I couldn't hear sorry what's that you say that this is possible to use these building as as a CPR like common pool resource okay well it's a private property actually most of these abandoned buildings are private properties and we rented out we rented out for them for the purpose of building this experiment and also to film it and I think in the bigger picture the city or the government should find a way to to re-propose all these abandoned buildings as I said that we are working with the bank or metropolitan governments to transform some of their abandoned shop houses to become a housing for this like first stopper the people who just graduate I think more and more the government see all this problem and but it's as usually as a government could be they're slow it will take a lot of time but the fact that they already are interested in looking at all these abandoned property now it's in Bangkok is kind of part issue that we luckily we were the one who worked on this before so they came to discuss with us it is already a good sign that the public the government also started to think how to deal with all these abandoned properties to answer your questions I think it's bigger than us as an architect because basically architecture became investment architecture is it's not architecture as we there are levels let's say buildings became investment a lot of buildings in a big city like Bangkok, Tokyo, New York, Singapore people just bought as an investment nobody lives there and how we as an architect do something with this I think it's much bigger than what we could do it's the the system of economy in general I remember like five, six years ago I came here I visited New York and I I had a chance to meet Kenneth Frampton and I don't remember what we thought and he said that those things are not buildings, they are money you don't say that this is architecture or building they are money, they are purely money so it sounds quite hopeless as you said we as an architect cannot really do much on this because it's much bigger than we are but what we could do I think is to inspire people to show people what the not what the problems are and what could be a possible solution they might believe that they might not but that's perhaps the most we could do I think we have to end on that hopeful note but thank you so much for I mean the number of questions is a testament to how how many people were engaged by the kind of thought experiment of the I hope it made you think more I mean I don't want to give a kind of definite answer to anything but I just hope that it's a start of your AAD program and you should keep thinking thank you