AMP
ANANTAPA THONGTAWACH
INTERIOR | ARCHITECT | INTERACTIVE DESIGNER
Preface Even though my inspirations often come from many sources, for instance, Frank Lloyd Wright’s modern house, the Bauhaus movement, my fondness in the pure and simple look of Apple products, MAD architect, the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames, the “Less is more” principle by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but it’s quite rational to say that the deepest influence is Buddhism. I have always found Buddhism in particular to be aesthetically sublime. Buddhism for me was intended to imitate the intimate essence of nature, not its actual appearance, but to serve as an aid to meditation about the true meaning of life. It was somehow used to symbolize purity, made expressive by its reduction of abstract forms. Through this simple presence, nature could transmit the most profound thoughts. Passionate to the point of obsessive about Buddhism principles of design, my main focus in design has always been how to create spaces that are both aesthetically appealing and functioning. I have significant interest in forms that can be transformed into multifunctional and how we can use that capability to answer the question of what would be the most fitting design for modern society. A new direction for design is invisibility. This means creating function out of the least complicated details possible, although it’s never easy to design a modern, comfortable and durable piece.
Sooner or later there comes a time in life when you start to wonder what reality is and where to find it. This was where I began the quest for reality, looking closely at nature. Through learning architecture, I found that form is dependent upon the integrity of structure. Soon I realize this principle applies to everything considered the basic level of things in life. Forms in nature subsume mechanisms of such mystery. To fully understand reality requires exquisite understanding of the construction of nature, which is often formed by biological patterns, for example, the structure of the human skeleton and the geometrical patterns of snow flakes. The mathematical rules the universe are visible to men in the form of beauty.
 John Michell ( 1933-, English philosopher ) This leads back to what I said before about the concept of modern design in Buddhism, that nature could transmit the most profound thoughts by its simple presence. The form of geometry is not just a combination of lines and angles, but the bridge between the One and the Many. When you draw a basic figure, a circle, it is not just a circle, but it is the abstract ideal of a circle, the unchanging and unmanifest one. In nature, the one circle gives rise to the many, in the roundness of oranges, eyeballs, and the orbits of the planets. This applies to all geometric types, on every scale, in every natural pattern of growth or movement. This beauty which is inherent in patterns of nature can never be matched. People are moved by the beauty of happenstance. I truly believe that nature is the greatest design in existence.
I am inspired by minimalist artist such as Tokujin Yoshioka, who is a Japanese artist and designer. Tokujin is known for his passion in nature. For him, design is by nature very free, and there’s nothing in design that says certain things must be a certain way. “I think of my designs as demonstrating the kind of beauty that comes from drapes in a dress, for example, beauty that results from happenstance and randomness. It is the sort of beauty that is driven not by any intent to achieve a particular result, but rather conceived through naturally occurring forces, almost serendipitously. “ Tokujin Yoshioka[16] I think the most important thing in designing a space is to design people’s feeling, and to create what touches people’s hearts. Because nature never shows you the exact same thing twice, and that in itself is proof that it is alive. I want the spaces I create to be alive and to show the beauty of living things. Moreover, I’m looking for a new structure or a new approach that has never existed before, spaces that can change, respond, and communicate in social situation as if it were one of us. I want to create mysterious auras that change the qualities of their surroundings merely by their presence.
KINESIS Kinesis is an installation which enhances gestural interactions through spatial transformation in order to create magical experiences. Kinesis ties together notions of spatial controls and body gesture. It is naturally at the intersection of art and technology. Projection of real 3 dimensional spaces where a user can interact directly with the space without timing or instruction will be set and allows user to create their personal experiences.
Does magic exist, or do we perceive inexplicable acts as magic just because it exceeds our limits of perception? If that’s the case, can magic be created? Everyday new technologies are created with promising abilities; however, a number of technologies are lost and forgotten while others are seen as unobtainable. In the latter case, innovation is often held back by those with extensive knowledge and experience, but running under the assumption that all of nature’s laws and boundaries are well understood. This mindset has repeated itself countless times throughout history, like those who thought the Earth was flat or the sound barrier could not be broken. Worse are those that stifle progress due to fear of change that is all too often born out of willful ignorance. I think magic and even superpowers as portrayed in books and films that grant us the ability to turn invisible or allow minds to move objects are not only entertaining, but not as impossible as one might think. By using existing technology in the simplest way, I believe that we can tear down the wall between innovation and fantasy, opening up endless possibilities. For instance, a simple wave of arm and everything moves. Computers are amazing, better than humans in many cases, at conducting thousands of processes and calculations in mere seconds. However, computers stumble to work outside tidy, orderly and predictable coding; in other words, they fail miserably in the real world. Computers are capable of seeing information we enter but unable to understand why. They are good at sensing numbers - how many users are using the system - but they fail to identify a person’s intention or emotion. At best, our computers are deaf, dumb, and mostly unaware of the environment they are in or of the user who interacts with them. Additionally, teaching a computer to respond to human behavior requires a deep understanding our own. My goal is to endow a prototype with these abilities; one that can see people, recognize them, determine what direction they’re facing, in order to create magical experiences by controlling a space around them. I looked into the technology that can use such divine abilities over our environment. I’m arguing that there is a clear distinction between gimmicky gestural technology and truly bringing sorcery to life. The way we control things should be much more fluid and intuitive. In order to reach that goal, I need to find a sensing technology
ELECTROK INESIS Electrokinesis is the ability to control and produce electricity. This installation represent modern physics through physical transformation of a mechanic system. The user will be able to draw in and out the electricity that is running inside the system, cause it go slower, faster, or even stop and rearrange its components. The space changes when the kinect detects rotate behavior and can be released back to its initial state when the user takes their hands back far enough.
Started from the most fundamental sensing technology: capacitive sensing, which is a technology, based on capacitive coupling, that takes human body capacitance as input. Capacitive sensors detect anything that is conductive or has a dielectric different from that of air. With this technology I made a product called “Hypotrochoid� , which is a lamp constructed by winding conductive thread around laser-cut transparent acrylic parts. The conductive thread was connected to a microprocessor programmed by an Arduino that captured the specific movement of any hand gesture in close proximity. This activated a trigger which turned the light on and off.
HYPOTROCHOID
CAPACITIVE SENSING LAMP
THE CHARMING OF
WHITE
Mark Mobius’ Residence Bangkok, Thailand Designed and built by Anantapa Thongtawach
“Translating Ancient Thai elements into modern lifestyle.”
Dr.Joseph Mark Mobius is one of the leaders in a global investigation and emerging markets fund management. His lifestyle evolves around business travel and building recreation spaces for himself all over the world. White is his favorite color. The concept first started, with the intention to create a direct analogy with the client’s visual identity, in order to continue the designer’s idea of differentiate spaces based on the users, combines with the designer’s additional concept which is to adapt, simplify, and translate combination of oriental ancient elements into a city lifestyle. This modern apartment in the middle of Bangkok is spiritually connected with the sublime aesthetic of Thai Buddhism. The fundamental belief of Thai religion has always been the root of how we simplify our life. Thai people from two hundred years ago spend most of their time outdoors as part of nature. There were trees penetrating through terraces in the middle of the house. It is important for them to draw in their natural surroundings by placing potted plants around the terrace. There was never a line that defines space between inside and outside. They lived as part of nature, and nature as part of them. The level of the floor changes as one moves from room to terrace, providing a wide variety of positions for sitting or lounging around the living areas. Furniture is sparse and includes a bed platform, dining table and loose cushions for sitting. Sleeping areas are set up so that the beds are aligned with the shorter end of the room. There was no cabinet. Nothing was built in. Thai people kept their belongings in small chests or vases that placed around the house, which is also a result of their sense of community and religious beliefs influenced by spiritually significant structures of ancient feng-shui. Therefore, all of this cultural styles has been given the new meaning and adjust on to every scents of this apartment. Everything in this apartment was designed with guiding tenet of simplicity, but not the shallow simplicity that comes from an uncluttered look and feel of surfaces, but the deep simplicity that comes from knowing the essence of every detail of every need of the owner. .
Minimalism was presented in many ways. With the principle of Buddhism simplicity held tight, the one color used was white with accent of stainless steel polished grey. To emphasize more in the details, the designer played with the clean elegance of mixing different textures of only one color material such as clear glasses, milky acrylics, and solid white wood boards together. In conclusion, in order to mimic Thai style, all the furniture shown is loose. Cabinets were invisibly hidden into walls. Small loose furniture’s, chests, and acrylic vases were placed randomly but intentionally in the corners. Form does not follow only function but also emotion. The living room functionality was created using combination of small acrylic drawers with different transparencies, placed them together as to perform a longitudinal table shape that can be used as a working desk on one end and a dining table on the other. Mixing in with a square shape bucket for plants that looks like it interpenetrated through the floor into furniture from the room below. Significantly expanding the scale, the designer put full size mirrors on both end of the room to extend the vision of furniture’s line to infinity. As for the bedrooms, bed platforms was built elevated the floor level up to allow space for sinking ten inches over size cushion.
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Opaque Opaque plays with the notion of spatial transformation between two and three-dimentional. Geometric manifestation from light through energy through matter. Its form configure archetypes as stretched or compressed pentagons.
THE FALLEN
PENDANTS
2013 N E W
Y O R K
The Fallen Pendants are designed to be sculptures of hope. They are inspired by the Japanese Tanabata festival, also known as the star festival. Japanese people generally celebrate by writing wishes, sometimes in the form of poetry, on small pieces of paper, and then hanging them on bamboo. The look-alike floor lamps in the sculpture conceptualize fallen stars. Heavy-looking pendants, bent down and touching the ground, aim to create a feeling of spirituality. The locations of the star sculptures are set to reflect certain constellations, alluding to the zodiac. Visitors are encouraged to write wishes on the provided pieces of paper and tie them to the stars’ structure, similar to wishing upon real stars. As time passes and more wishes are added, the sculpture will grow into a monument of hope created by its visitors.
Immateriality One of the most used methodologies for project design in architecture consists of starting with developing a concept, materializing it, and designing details in order to enter the productive phase. These stages go in hand with the selection of materials, which is done at the end of the design process phase. However, in some cases selecting the material at the beginning of the process can be a source of innovation in product development. In this case selection of materials goes in hand with emotional design rather than physical in order to settle an interesting ground between modern and traditional style. Sandy beach apartment shows variety of ways to work around traditional material and patterns, combining ancestry techniques with new technology. All materials are custom made in Thailand. Thai traditional graphics were used on various infrastructures such as perforation of stainless cabinet doors, floor tiles, wall coverings and bed cushions. Perforated stainless door enable better ventilation through out the place.
Liquor This dynamic space was randomly generated by liquid transitioning inside a container, which resulted in a sculptural living space. To make its intimidating surrounding more subtle, the structure was covered by wood that represented the ambient amber liquor captured within.
ART
&
CRAFT
Dilavie is a well-known high-end jewelry brand originally from Bangkok, Thailand. The owner want her new store in the heart of Bangkok to give a new fresh look targeting young generation. The pattern design of Dilavie came from diamond’s cubic crystal structure, which is a repeating pattern of 8 atoms. The vertices of the diamond’s cubic are represented by all possible three-dimensional grid points and the edges of the diamond cubic are represented by a subset of the three dimensional grid edges. Therefore, the diamond three-dimensional structure has been simplified in to chamfer triangular graphics for the design in order to show natural delicacy represented by art and craft.
Perforated paper has been chosen for prototyping. The perforation allows various parts of the paper to be separated from one another by simply folding and tearing along the cease line. After having the paper structure ready, it is when computer engineering came in handy. Forces have been re calculated and paper has been replaced by perforated stainless steel sheets as main structure, make it possible to preserve a paper art form that represent the inner beauty of triangular diamond structure.
Novelty of
Structure
Since nature traffics in efficiency, hexagonal tesselation recurs endlessly in nature. Applying this structure to the Bangkok Natural Disaster Center ensures its durability. One of the main ideas is for the building to serve as the refugee’s center by providing extreme accessibilities from every direction by all kind of transportations. The building’s main entrance is comprised of 25 main cores. Twenty-one elevators are provided at the hexagonal outlying points of the plan’s intersection. Elevator’s shafts are not only served as structures but can also be seen as the building’s main facade. Combination of vertical lines twisted and combined together, performing dramatic illuminating movement toward the sky.
THE ORIGINALITY OF
TEXTURE KON is a Thai high end clothing which emphatizes on the production of textiles as a craft whose speed and scale of production has been altered by industrialization and the introduction of modern manufacturing techniques.
KON targets young high maintenance women in the city. under the concepts of glamorous, futuristic and fun. Representing delicacy and appreciation of creation of textile, 485 cable lines were set up and used for spatial organization and decoration both vertically and horizontally integrated.
ANANTAPA THONGTAWACH
INTERIOR | ARCHITECT | INTERACTIVE DESIGNER TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS
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