INDA Newsletter 2012 by William Patera

INDA|PUBLICATIONS International Program in Design and Architecture. Chulalongkorn University

11-12

INDA Office Room 409, Architecture Building Architecture Faculty, Chulalongkorn University Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 THAILAND

04 -INDA Semestrial Newsletter Number 04. August 2012. FREE INDA NEWSLETTER 2011 -2012

This is INDA In 2012, as we welcome students to the start of our 7th academic year, we bid farewell to our third graduating class. Our program is relatively new, but has grown from an initial intake of only 48 students to our current first year class of 85 students. In this short time, we have quickly reached our goals of academic excellence, with the success of our program measured by the quality of our graduates. Many have gained employment in local and international practices. Others have continued to graduate study, with several placements at top international schools, including Harvard GSD and Columbia in the US, The AA and the Bartlett in the UK. We are proud that our graduates are well-rounded, with academic knowledge, independent thinking skills, practical abilities, and a strong sense of social and community responsibility. 2011 has been a dynamic and diverse academic year, with a number of

international collaborations and events. One highlight was the “(Un) Anticipated Futures” symposium, hosted jointly by the Faculty of Architecture and the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with academic guests from Parsons, The New School for Design in New York and the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. There were also new and continuing international workshops, with students visiting ETH in Zurich, welcoming the AA visiting school, and taking part in the ‘When express ways hit the city’ workshop at Chu Hai College of Higher Education in Hong Kong alongside students from Parsons and the National University of Cheng Kung (Taiwan). Many of our students also took advantage of our exchange partnerships, which this year enabled 33 students from our year 4 class to study for a semester elsewhere in Asia, Australia, Europe or the US. This academic year, we welcome students from Meiji

University (Japan) and Parsons The New School for international workshops, several visiting scholars, as well as new and returning faculty members. Engaging in global, regional, and local issues is a key strategy for an international program, enabling students to gain understanding of the ever changing socio-economic and technological climate that shapes our built environment. With freedom to create and collaborate on their own projects, INDA faculty has contributed tremendously to undertaking new challenges and engaging in multiple arenas. Together they have developed a mission statement, committing to being Fresh, Focused, and Forward: a fresh approach to design, a focus on Bangkok and its regional importance, and looking forward to the challenges as our profession opens its doors to the ASEAN region in 2015.

DR. PREECHAYA SITTIPUNT Our local engagement with communities here in Thailand has also continued, with our summer design build projects gaining generous support from sponsors. We express our gratitude to; Misubishi Electric Thai Foundation, Thailand, Mitsubishi Elevator (Thailand Co. Ltd.), Mitsubishi Electric Consumer Products (Thailand Co.Ltd.), PTT Public Co Ltd., National Bank of Thailand, Thongtawan Ltd., Infinite Brilliance Engineering Co Ltd., Bio Consumers Co., Ltd., and Bkk Bank. In 2016, Chulalongkorn University will celebrate its 100th anniversary, shortly after the Faculty of Architecture commemorates its 80th anniversary in March 2013. INDA is proud to share the prestige and tradition of Thailand’s oldest and most important University, and welcomes the challenge of moving forward, generating and testing new design ideas for an ever changing world.

Table of Contents INTRO INDA philosophy

NEWS INDA life and events

Students and Faculty update

DONE BY Design Build projects 2012

International Workshops

INDA Year One

INDA Year Two

INDA Year Three

INDA Year Four

ARTICLES Megastructures

2011-12 Student Workshops summer 2012 projects update DesignBuild + DesignExperimentation

1 2 3 4

ST YEAR. Design Projects by Year One students at INDA.

ND YEAR. Design Projects by Year Two students at INDA.

RD YEAR. Design Projects by Year Three students at INDA.

Introducing new section:

students,

staff

and

invited guest’s Articles.

INDA new ID

TH YEAR. Design Projects by Year Four students at INDA.

| Chulalongkorn University | Faculty of Architecture International Program in Design + Architecture Office | Room 409, Architecture Buillding Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 THAILAND |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

NEWS

{ REPORT FROM INDA FACULTY AND STUDENTS }

Is Zero Waste a Future of Fashion â&#x20AC;&#x153;Is Zero Waste a Future of Fashion and Design?â&#x20AC;? is a workshop hosted by Ministry of Foreign Affairs together with Thailand Textile Institute (THTI) and INDA. Keynote speakers include Assoc. Prof. Simon Collins, Dean of the School of Fashion at Parsons, and Susan Klebanoff, World textile artist. The event was held at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) on June 23, 2012, where INDA students participated in space

Inda school life

design under the given concept. Pimchanok Kimsawat (Janny) and Jirachaya Kerdpanya (Mew), led by Dr. Kanwipa Methanuntakul, developed the meeting room atmosphere by employing scrapped thread left over from manufacturing processes. The formation of renewable thread connoted the meaning of zero waste in textile industry.

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ REPORT FROM INDA FACULTY AND STUDENTS }

NEWS

Graduation Inda Gala INDA has produced well-rounded students over the past few years with our vision to strengthen knowledge alongside worldly-wise apprehension. Many INDA students pursue their passion for studying at the world’s renowned university such as Kannvisuth Sukpisan (Columbia University) and Ken Chongsuwat (Harvard University). From hardworking and skillful talent, INDA students gain an opportunity to work abroad with global company, for example, Sarita Tejasmit. - Sunny and Putt got accepted at the AA EmTech programme for next coming school year (2012/13)

Held on July 21st, 2012, the third annual INDA gala honored the graduating class of 2008. INDA students created stage performances including “One night only”, “Velerie”, “Be Italian” and “Fame”.

The event ended beautifully with Thai traditional custom; INDA students expressed their gratitude for instructors through candle bestowment.

Exhibition & SuperCrit SuperCrit. May 18. Exhibition Hall, Faculty of Architecture Year-End Exhibition. May 18-31 Chulalongkorn Museum 4th Floor

Collaboration INDA ArchDes 4 studio collaborated with Executive Engineer from Meinhardt (Thailand), Dr. Wissawa Chakpaisarn |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

NEWS

{ REPORT FROM INDA FACULTY AND STUDENTS }

Demon in Venice . The S The spectators enter the garden, shoes off, walking barefoot in the full-moon night, surrounded by their shadows.... They proceed inside an obscure structure, through an aggregative density that seems paradoxically weightless, and soon leads them to a deep sinkhole, as the perimeter of the drama, where the play could eventually start. For Jitti’s Demon In Venice performance, in the pursuit of Thomas Man’s novel... with an apparatus trying to contain the invasion of the epidemic disease, the Cholera, trying to repulse the wind of Death and its somberness to preserve the particles of life scattered behind the illusory protection wall… Wind and water are never considering the efficiency of human obstacles as impassable; their natures are untamable, driven by encroachment, overcrossing, overflowing …

... The flooding of both Bangkok and Venice is a real and non-contingent fact... here despite the awkwardly dismembering landscape, with its lost whiteness, its lost paradise... Black is the future, and the naïve and fragile barrier turns its own physicality against the protagonists, who are coated, wrapped, smothered and strangled by the decaying, by the fragmenting, in a multitude that human constructed and organized... to become again a swarm with its own logic, with its own impermanence and fluidity.

by [eIf/bȥt/c] architects Camille Lacadee Francois Roche

with Nutthapong Jiratthiticharoen Natreeya Kraichitti Thanaporn Lam Pisut Phumchaosoun Jariyaporn Prachasartta Sitthiwat Suddhijaru Bahnfun Chittmittrapap

The pool was a pool, not any more… it turns into a deep, bottomless sinkhole, engraving and digging the ground to find the door to hell…. while the moonlight observes the “dance macabre ” of the daemon in the Siamese twin sister of Venice, Bkk

W i n n e r s ! Sunny + Honey, Putt + Panpan and Champ work from ArchDes 4 (Y4 temr 1) will be published by IAAC / Actar-Birkhauser in the forthcoming book - City Sense, Shaping Our Environment with Real-Time Data.

“We cannot deny the fact that wherever development goes, the inclination of vegetation or green space will occur. It is because the old urban typology of building is not specifically designed to deal with this issue.”

Bangkachao, an isolated district also known as “Bangkok’s lungs” occupying over 18sq.km of green space situated in the center of Bangkok, supplying six tons of Oxygen to the city. These preserve areas are now almost untouched by developments. It is a perfect testing ground for the system when land is too valuable to be left as it is. The location proves provoking quality due to its proximity to the center of Bangkok. |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ REPORT FROM INDA FACULTY AND STUDENTS }

NEWS

Spirit of the Age . INDA @ TIEE 40 collages and photo-montages by 2nd year students were on show from 4th to 31st of October at the BIA centre (Budhasa Indapanno Archives) under the title “The Spirit of the Age”. The pieces are attempts to read in the interrelated cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual and political climates associated with our era. The work was developed in 1 week, responding to the brief “The (United) States of Things”, in which students were to meditate and reflect upon the time we are currently living in. The selected 40 students collaborated in the setting up of the exhibition as well as assisting with some of the graphic material

MOULD PART 1 4P

MOULD PART 2

MOULD PART 1 MOULD PART 2

MOULD PART 4

MOULD PART 3

by Kamonsin Chathurattaphol Camille Lacadee Antoine Lassus Pannassan Sombuntham

A FROZEN DREAM Kathmandu Photo Gallery presents “A Frozen Dream”, a photographic exhibition by Connelly La Mar, a practising artist residing in Bangkok who continues to show his photographic work internationally. A Frozen Dream will be on show

at Kathmandu Photo Gallery from Saturday until June 30. The opening reception is on Saturday at 6:30pm. The gallery is at 87 Pan Road (near the Indian Temple) and opens every Tue-Sun from 11am-7pm. Call 02234-6700. La Mar’s work usually focuses on

SILICON PIECE

This structure is an Octet truss. Its an isotropic vector matrix invented by Graham Bell, and developed by Richard Buckminster Fuller. The structure module consists of one hectahedron and one octahedron. Together they form a piece that can be fractalised filling all spaces creating a triangulated structure in which every member is working only in compression with no bending moment creating a very strong spaceframe regardles the direction of the load. This piece has been build by Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes in collaboration with first and second year students of INDA. It is based on tutor’s research (F. Hellberg’s thesis) being developped with students. With this structure we show what

MOULD PART 3

we do. The patterns created by the different orientations of the truss are the base for the new graphic identity of INDA, all based on triangulated geometries, so the structure itself is a big banner that shows what we are. The structure was built with bamboo and acrilic pieces, combining local tradition with local new materials (cast rubber joints were also designed for this piece). It was put together by both tutors and students in 12 hours and all m terials will remain usable after dismantling it. When the rubber pieces (shown in the drawings) get produced by a thai factory, both the materials and the construction process will be coherent with our philosophy of construction. by F. Hellberg & L. Lesmes

subcultures, and consumption, as an idea. The exhibition reflects how unease has pervaded his frozen dream visions of his adopted city, Bangkok, as if he is not quite at home in it. by Connelly La Mar

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

DONE BY

{ DESIGN BUILD PROJECTS 2012 }

INDIA: “Would Have Been My Last Complaint” CAMILLE LACADEE

FRANCOIS ROCHE

EZIO BLASETTI

STEPHAN HENRICH

“ It would have been the last Leaving my condition unresolved I would have felt......... this liquid light.......... running through my hands Despite the courage and the fall........... despite the spikes...... the suffering It would have been my blood Amidst the stars.......... the Aries It would have been a sign On the battlefield of my body And i would have waited for them Tangled up in desires and abandon It would have taken my breath To out throw the lamentation And when the rain falls tomorrow It would have trapped........... my last complaint “ Shell-ter title: “Devil Trap” Students Cameron David Newnham, Suthiwat Yanawiboot, Pim Jular, Mark-Henry Jean Decrausaz, Pajareeya Suriwong, Myrtille Fakhreddine, Nichapatara Swangdecharux, Cheng Yu Ling, Wachira Leangtanom, Mark Kowalyov, Pantira Unarat, Natreeya Kraichitti, Lila Tedesco, Javed Godkin Paul de Costa, Peeraya Suphasidh, Arisa Juengsophonvitavas, Papat Jinaphun, Nicha Laptaveepanya, Nuthapong Jiratiticharoen, Benjawan Lamsa-ard, Tachapol Danaboonchai, Suthata Jiranuntarat, Yanisa Chumpolphaisal, Jenwit Narukatphichai, Permpoon Rojanasakul. Construction Manjunath & Co, Engineer Ravi N.Pattegar, Civil Engineer Acknowledgements Sri Ganapati Vedeshwar, librarian Sanjeen SingPawat Danielle Willems Devin Jerrigan Gwyl Jahn Elias Tabet |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ DESIGN BUILD PROJECTS 2012 }

BANGKOK:

Modern (C)art.

Try to imagine the streets of Bangkok without street food carts. If you can’t, neither is that surprising, nor should you be discouraged. We have done that for you in mural-form, but before we get to that please be patient enough to hear out this catechism. If you can imagine a cart-less Krungtheep, or perhaps if this is less of a challenge than a fantasy, meaning you share a widely held prejudice that street carts increase congestion and danger, indulge us this syllogism that proves Bangkok—as we know it—could not exist without the street cart. Street carts are as old as streets; in Bangkok, this means street carts have participated in Thai sociality since the time of Rama IV and the

in a country with the highest female labor force participation rate in Asia. And, you guessed right, that is also partly due to the street cart. Maybe now is the time to speculate on an image of a cart-less Bangkok. Without its robust street vending ecology the 1997 crisis would have produced a larger unemployed population that would remain unemployed possibly for years until the economy corrected itself with increased structural employment. During this financial purgatory, the unemployed would be defaulting at a higher rate on their more expensive and larger homes, spending more of their savings on food rather than personal investment, losing rather than accumulating capital,

around and through its vibrant street vending ecology. Students documented each interaction and transaction entailed by the operation of each cart, and mapped out the overlapping constellations of food networks, rent networks, utilities networks, aesthetic values, cart hierarchies, geographical associations and macro level forces that define the Supaphong street vending society. As this is an Architectural design build studio, and as our focus pertains to public eating culture, our output was determined to be as publicly accessible as possible. To communicate our research we chose the most communal of artistic media: the street mural. And,

TAYLOR LOWE & DR. PREECHAYA SITTIPUNT above each mural—in the fashion clean dining environments, with of traditional cosmographies—are materially warm wood floors as well the forces and histories in which as decadently muraled roofs to Soi Supaphong persists. Each protect consumers from Bangkok’s Cartography will operate on the cart punishing rain and sun. To both as either a wall or roof mural. equip the theatre and dining The Modern (C)art, apart from spaces with eating implements and exhibiting the Cartographies to replace plastic and styrofoam publicly, is designed to support packaging, we employed pintos, or the relations and interactions that tiffins, that consumers can borrow to already exist separately in the public purchase food along Supaphong and arena of the street and within the private domain of the surrounding transport back to their exceptional homes. Currently, soi Supaphong is dining space in the Modern (C)art. one of a network of Bangkok streets This cart will not compete with other that caters predominantly to take carts; rather, as a good community away food. Local residents and member, it will stimulate business international tourists alike come within the take out community but to Supaphong, purchase a broad reduce the costs and waste associated smattering of exceptional regional with typical take-out food.

paving over of many of the city’s historic canals. For 150 years, then, relations among Thais, immigrants, the urban, the rural, men, women, the rich, the poor and tourists have been performed with street carts participating in their interactions. It is safe to say contemporary class, politics, ethnicity, and gender politics in Bangkok are a product—like phat thai, hoi thawt, or kuay thiaw—of street carts and their users. Are you skeptical? Of course you are. If you are reading this text in English, you are likely an infrequent customer of street food. But, if you are Thai and reading this text, it is likely your forbearers ate at or possibly owned street cart stalls, which supported the upward mobility that enabled your English fluency. If you are a foreigner being paid to work in Thailand, your paycheck comes from the economic stability that the street cart has provided the Thai economy since the beginning of Thai capitalism. If you are a Thai woman preparing for or working in a Thai workplace, congratulations, you live

conceivably increasing rates of depression, homelessness, obesity (by consuming the alternative: cheap processed foods) and substance abuse. With less employment and emptier buildings, and with the attendant decline of public eating, streets would become emptier, the protective scrutiny of the public eye would diminish, tax revenue would shrink and, coupled with the increasing desperation of a discouraged and unhealthful populace, crime would increase. How could a more dangerous, unhealthy and impoverished society hope to stimulate domestic spending, attract international investment, or maintain the cultural niceties that contribute to its reputation as ‘a land of smiles’?

befitting the focus of our research, for our architectural pursuit we designed a street cart that would not aspire to replace or enhance a single cart typology, but rather would be designed for the network of the street’s carts in its entirety. Our studio was correspondingly divided into Cartographers—the muralists—and Cartists—the cart makers. Our 4 Cartographies illustrate the complex assemblages of actors and actions that accompany the carts in the morning and evening of Soi Supaphong, as well as in the imagined builtscapes of a cartless Supaphong and a Supaphong furnished with our own Modern (C)art design. Every transaction and interrelational dynamic that we observed on the site is represented in an imagined perspectival rendering that unfolds, opens-up and even serializes spaces and events into a single image. Below each panoramic mural is a series of enlarged vignettes that emphasize some of the more essential actions occurring within the scene, while

Thai dishes, and then leave the street to consume their food in the comfort and cleanliness of their homes or hotel rooms, typically in front of the television. This pattern of consumption could not be possible, however, without the participation of plastic bags, Styrofoam boxes, distant landfi lls, the Great Pacific Garbage patch, waste trafficking, global warming and increased rates of cancer from plastic erosion in hot take-away food. These actors would not be active in the community if more of the amenities of private domestic space—clean floors, entertainment, seating, rain and heat protection—were publicly available on such a take-away-food street. So, recognizing the absence of conditions otherwise supplied— at great environmental and public health costs—by private domestic space, we designed a cart that could transform into a 10 person stadium seating theatre, equipped with portable dining tables and storage, as well as an 18 person dining area. Both spaces would provide

Our studio began with this theoretical appreciation of the street cart as as essential nonhuman actor in Thai society. Limiting our research and project to one site—Supaphong Soi 3—we unpacked the complexity of social relations structured

Students Jintawach Tasanavites Jiratt Khumkomgool Chayatip Changlum Chayapat Chaiyanun Chanya Siriphannon Thunporn Montrisrisak Nole Suwanparin Pratan Tingsomchaisilp Panuwat Panpattanasil Wanaphorn Soonthornyanakij Wichapol Hirunsathitporn Swinya Chavanich.

Collaborators Ekamai street vending community.

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

DONE BY

{ DESIGN BUILD PROJECTS 2012 }

BANGKOK: Salvatore Ferragamo . KANWIPA METHANUNTAKUL & JASMINE DÜRR To promote a brand effectively, it couldn’t be argued that retail store becomes a focal point of branded product expression. With the purpose of giving students an opportunity to understand how design can support store image and product showcase. The collaboration between INDA and Ferragamo has been initiated to explore an interdisciplinary study of three dimensional spaces of the store environment and retail branding. This design build studio endeavors to provide students a knowledge from marketing-led perspective with real practical experiences. As a world’s renowned fashion brand, Ferragamo has strong brand identity presented through design elements. The brand is eligible for INDA students to learn how global luxury brand manage visual presentation in overseas. Students are required to examine tangible elements of window display design along with consumer behavior before installation on the site. However, as a global brand, it is compulsory that the details of window display must share the same design standard. A multidimensional context of the role of design in the visualization and experience of global brands then will be investigated thoroughly before production process. Primary and Students secondary researches are conducted by students according to Ferragamo Kevalee Vithayaruksun physical products and window display site. The location for this design build Jirachaya Kerdpanya project is at Central Chidlom where structure of the storefront is already Chinnapat Wattanasombat built. Consequently, audiences’ viewpoints towards the site are key Thanacheth Mahatthananuyut fundamental factor. It can be easily noticed that a visual presentation of Pimchanok Kimsawat window display may be varied based upon view angle and time spending Pisut Phumchaosoun on the site. The store’s functional qualities Smith Wararatchai interrelate with psychological attributes which affect buying Supatsiri Kuenghakit behavior. Hence, this studio will start with site analysis, consumer Nalinnipha Yala behavior, retail store design, fashion brand building and experimentation Nichakamol Horungruang with the materials. Not only learning from practice, students are playing Sitthiwat Suddhijaru the role of window dresser as they are required to help Ferragamo choosing Thanawat Phituksithkasem. actual products for current season. After pre-fabrication process, an internal design competition will be hosted in the group in order to Collaborators allow students to liberally design their window display under the given subject. Within the period of Ferragamo, Thailand six weeks time, a learner-friendly environment is a key. |

NEW YORK: Psychogeographies. “Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”.” - www. psychogeography.co.uk By definition the experience of inhabiting a strange city is going to put students in an alien setting, and as a way to avoid generalizing experiences a psychogeography will allow us to create a personal methodology to navigate this experience. It’s a way to get, and create a specific context for people to understand the nature of this city. So, this psychogeography, as a strategy should bring you in essence closer to the city, and the nature of this environment. Final Cut Pro and Photoshop tutorials should give the students adequate tools to generate several possible final results related

to their personal engagement with the history of this movement. “The sectors of a city...are decipherable, but the personal meaning they have for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.” - A Critique of Separation Students who choose to join this class conducted in New York City will spend approximately threeand-a-half weeks of class time in the city in order to participate in lectures, screenings, printmaking and workshops. This is all before two executed public interventions using psychogeographic strategies to build based on the human as a metric, which will be completed by the class in the city itself. Dates will run from Tuesday, June 26, 2012. Initial actions will include

CONNELLY LAMAR workshops and site visits focusing principally on understanding: fi lm, photography and performance art, as a methodology to explore the idea of psychogeography. Research and reading assignments will be augmented by visits to historically relevant locations, print libraries, rare book collections, art galleries, museums and an organized trip for three days to Yale University School of Architecture in New Haven, Conn. Upon completion of an initial series of psychogeographic studies students should define a site, and begin to explore the idea of a constructed geography, using a variety of media, and to recruit necessary people, including potentially members of the community to participate in this project via advertising and interviews. Each student working together, or in a group of three will then create

BANGKOK: FloES > Floating Energy

TAKUYA ONISHI, ALVARO CONTI, AND MASATO ASHIDA, KENTARO TAK

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ DESIGN BUILD PROJECTS 2012 } Students

a performance/intervention into urban-space based on their systems and research. This can function to interrupt, activate or reuse a space using humans as a metric.

Atima Yusadatt Korn Supsakorn Korrakot Kulkraisri Nawat Wongwan

Once the approach is defined a physical manifestation of this must be put into action using media, and with an understanding of a site. This will be approved by the instructors. The final requirement for the course will be submission of a documentation of the classes performances/interventions in images, or a fi lm that constitute a complex articulated idea. This is to be submitted or presented by July 28. These works are required in order for the class to be completed.

Tomthong Rungsawang Thippapha Gaywee Thanaphon Morakotwichitkarn Thanbutr Huangthong Thawinee Wangmutitakul Naparat Dacharux Bahnfun Chittmittrapap Prompt Udomdech Pimsiri Tantew Patlapa Davivongsa

An exhibition is traditionally mounted of the work in the Fall after we return, but the class can vote and decide if they want to participate in the exhibition. Prior to departure students will be required to attend some lectures and screenings as the Architectural Environment in Film class will introduce you to the idea of the city as a space, and artists using different approaches to deal with it. It will also probe the idea of Manhattan as a narrative space, and a historic space.

y Station.

KI, KAMONSIN CHATHURATTAPHOL

Passara Tungvijitkul Lada Punyaneramitdee Wongsakorn Wattanavekin Supanut Bunjaratravee.

Collaborators NYU

Students

Ploynisa Mongkoladisai

Supavit Kerivananukul

Kornkamon Kaewprasert

Phittawat Chittapraneerat

Supavich Amornkul

Jarim Weeraboonchai

Patorn Phoopat

Sireethorn Kanyaratanamongkol

Choen Tuangsintanakul

Ratha Techasopapan

Waranchalee Suwanpimolkul

Nattaporn Bunyasirikul

Lapassanan Buranapatpakorn

Panachai Chankrachang

Wannakan Chongmeeluk

Pavin Banternghansa

Sirapa Supakalin

Sponsor Kyocera Collaborator Energy Meet, TODA Thailand

10 DONE BY

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ DESIGN BUILD PROJECTS 2012 }

SRA GAEW:

BANGKO Prefabricated Library. Communit EKALUCK

The interior team is in charge of furnishings and lighting, and also coming up with a color scheme that would fit with the library design. The public relations team handle all communication with sponsors, as well as documenting the library progress and also acquiring audience through social media platforms. They are also currently working on drafting a book layout for this library. The landscape team are in charge of the space outside the library parameter. The treasurer attends to all monetary tasks such as handling where our finances go. Finally, the project manager makes

STAPORNTONAPAT

sure the team works consistenty and efficiently within the time schedule give, and overseeing each teamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s progress and managing things as smooth as possible. Our project has received a wide audience that have helped through donations,

and

sponsoring.

currently have around 170 likes on Facebook and our team plus Ajarn Lynk have appeared live at Thai PBS Teens for interviews about this summer project. We hope to complete the project as soon as July 19th, to be confirmed. This

Our project revolves around the idea of prefabrication to undermine challenges such as time and cost and material sustainability. Starting from this project criteria, our modular library concept was chosen to be built with a team of 12 students under the supervision of Lynk Staporntonapat. We as students have and are still receiving work experience working within a professional environment where we are currently dealing with real life situations concerning liaisons and interactions with clients and possible sponsors, publishing and production services, architectural designs and challenges, and management of the overall project. As a team, our architects handle the practical side of the library, dealing with construction specifications and challenges that surface regarding the assembly of the final design.

project

will

enhance

community gathering space for an

informal

settlement

along

the Thonglor Police Station in Bangkok. Residents of informal communities, or urban villages, scattered

Students

Roongratsamee Jianpinitnan

Thanaphat Chullawut

Von Issara Urairat

Denise Justin Quema

Ekkrit (Supanat) Suwanwong

Thanaporn Raungpmungthong

Samascha Samcharoen

Parichat Sattayatham

Sartita Vongpradhip

Peechaorn Pimarnprom

Suarpha Vangvasu

throughout

Bangkok

Atitaya Taratai.

Collaborators Bann Kok Noi School

CHONBURI:

Baa Students Yanisa Dechwattanatam Pree Thirakul Pornprapa Rugwongprayoon Pichaporn Aroonrut Pimchanok Wangveeramit Malkunsam Lee Wanrada Wongvorakul Wuttiphon Rattanajitdamrong Kritphot Oanan Kittitat Jiranapapan Jariyaporn Prachasartta Jutavut Chaleampongpun Nattakan Thiamkeerakul Taravillai Emran Norataj Phuvatanaraksa Pailin Rojcheevaphan Phakthana Preedawiphat Apisub Phupha Bunyawat Prasitdumrong |

Sponsor

Misubishi Electric Corporation

(Thailand) Co. Ltd

Collaborator

Bann Klong Yai School

Baan Klong Yai has been selected as the recipient of this year program. It is underfunded and currently dire need of outside intervention. The scope of the intervention includes the repair of the existing roof and ceiling of the classrooms, relocation of the structurally unsounded kitchen, and building a new library. INDA team will operate during the months of June and July to deliver the design and the construction. After which, the team will join Mitsubishiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s larger team (consisting of the employees from 11 companies) in the official opening and CSR day.

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ DESIGN BUILD PROJECTS 2012 }

KHONKAEN: y next to Thonglor Police Station. Book Barn. NILAY MISTRY & KERRIE BUTTS

DR.

SCOTT

DRAKE

DR.

BUNDIT

CHULASAI

Students Kornchawan Ghettalae Chonradee Piyapaneekul Chanon Nanthamanop Nutthapat Thanapoonyanan Nussasi Numpituckchaikul Niti Potitatkul Phorphen Prasertsil Pimlada Bunluthangthum Pawika Charoenkul Mitree Srisuthipruth Rapa Surajaras Worarat Patumnakul Varis Niwatsakul Viruth Purichanont Veerasu Saetae Sasiri Siripakorn Sirapat Techaruvichit Arnut Areechitsakul Amanda Ellis Isaya Sasiprapha.

The aim of this project is to design and construct a ‘Book Barn’ for the local community near the township of Phon, Jangwat Khonkaen, Amphoe WangYai, Tambon. The idea of a Book Barn comes from the site in the local community, which currently consists of a small meeting hall of around 100m2, and an adjacent Rice Barn that is used to store rice in the period between harvest and planting. In front of the Rice Barn is a small space, which will be used to construct a small building to house books for use by the local children after school – hence a Book Barn. The design for the Book Barn will also include

several desktop computers with internet access to allow students to access online learning materials.

Students

Collaborators

provide the city with vital labor and services that support systems of the formal sector. In an upscale retail and entertainment corridor such as Thonglor, several low-income communities are located out of sight only a few meters away. Residents here supplement their income by collecting recyclable materials from area businesses, making use of the excessive waste of adjacent opulence. As

businesses

open

and

depending on uncertain market forces in the formal sector, resilient informal communities survive for generations. The community this project will engage with has existed for decades in the area but has recently been reduced in size due to the development of a highrise condominium. On a strip of land only a few meters wide, 43 households negotiate an unclaimed territory

between two separate property walls. Cleverly designed homes lean on existing infrastructure and achieve extremely

high

considering

densities

suitable

while

ventilation.

Narrow walkways outside of the homes

become

extensions

interior storage space and facilitate vending throughout the community. Upgrades by residents to the public spaces with salvaged construction material

are

further

signs

ingenuity and pride. This project will create a flexible gathering space for the community to use throughout the day and pronounce a clear entry point to this otherwise obscured community. This space will accommodate afterschool activities for children as well as comfortable seating for community meetings. By marking a threshold, this community

Rice Barns are common throughout Thailand, forming an important part of local communities. Farmers are able to borrow rice in order to plant a crop, and must then return the same amount plus interest when their crop is harvested. The Barns are typically small, well crafted structures, made of local hardwoods, with a roof of metal sheeting. The design brief for the Book Barn is to create a similarly well-crafted structure that will support the community as a place of learning and gathering for children.

Collaborators Thonglor Community, Royal Thai Police, District of Thonglor

is proven to exist.

n Klong Yai School Library. NARIN PARANULAKSA & PANNASAN SOMBUNTHAM Through the partnership with INDA and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Thailand, we are entrusted with the design and building a library for an underprivileged school. As a yearly CSR program, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Thailand finds, selects a school that is in dire need of intervention, and arrange for a multicompany event that provide the help. In past, the contribution came in the forms of donations, repair work, and minor site improvements. However, for the commemoration of the foundation’s 20th anniversary, they would like to expand the scope of the program and build a permanent structure. |

Kornpong Nualsanit Kasidej Anantaphongs Kittipat Paritsantik Chayongkul Tavitavonsawas Pasit Rojradtunasiri Napakaporn Buatong Drin Chulakasyena Noppadol Snitwongse Na Ayuthya Natchai Suwannapruk PatarapolChitapunya Panu Chiraguna Rutchai Suksakorn Vipu Chooprapawan Weerapol Rattanajitdamrong Patcharin Worapongsathorn Sorawit Vijitpornkul Sumana Amatayakul.

Municiple of Pol, Kankaen Province

Sponsor

Thongtawan Ltd., Infinite Brilliance Engineering Co., Ltd

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

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{ INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOPS }

Mapping the

Post-Flood Landscape of Bangkok . KERRIE BUTTS & NILAY MISTRY The devastation from the 2011 flooding of the Chao Phraya River and neighboring watersheds has brought to international attention the desperate need for coordinated water management practices throughout Thailand and across political borders.

(UN)ANTICIPATED FUTURES (Un)Anticipated Futures is an international Symposium bringing together research from three universities – Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, The New School in New York, and University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. This international collaboration brings together historians, social researchers, and designers in a context of unprecedented economic and ecological uncertainty. As financial crisis and environmental disasters appear around the globe, cross-disciplinary and international approaches are urgently needed to address design and development in urban landscapes increasingly in flux. The Symposium is part of a fourday workshop, from 16-19 February 2012. The first day will consist of fieldwork in development sites throughout metropolitan Bangkok. The Thai-Ministry of Foreign Relations, expanding on the Thai-

Coordinators: Kerrie Butts, Nilay Mistry.

US Creative Partnership Seminar for Green Building and Design held at the Ministry in September of 2011, will be co-hosting the second day of the symposium, which will be open to the public. On the third and fourth days, a workshop with visiting academics, faculty, and students

from the International Program in Design and Architecture (INDA) at Chulalongkorn University will take place. This symposium is the first of three collaborative events within the Design and Social Development Program which will be held in Buenos Aires and New York in 2013

Contributors: BKK: Pirasri Poyatong, Amorn Wanichwiwata and Danai Thaitakoo. -Chulalongkorn University. BsAs: Adriana Clemente, Javier Fernández Castro, Margarita Gutman, Martín Gromez, Mónica Lacarrieu, Carolina Mera, Ariel Misuraca, Lucila Pugni Reta, Juan Pablo Scaglia, Pedro Senar and Ileana Versace. -University of Buenos Aires (UBA) -School of Social Science (FCS) -School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism (UBA) NYC: Bill Morrish, Vyjayanthi Rao, Brian McGrath, Michael Cohen and Mandy Goodgoll. -The Observatory on Latin America -Prasons, The New School for Design -The New School for Social Research -International Affairs, The New School

The Architectural Apparatus Global sea level rise and land subsidence amplify the perils to Bangkok metropolitan area and surrounding infrastructure. Modern settlement patterns and construction in the region has neglected traditionally respected rhythms of the annual rainy season and ensuing swelling of the Chao Phraya River. New landscapes of occupation must account for flooding with site-specific strategies, which will in turn alter the engagement people have with recurring water. An interdisciplinary approach via architecture, landscape architecture, policymaking, and urban design is needed to addressing issues of this magnitude. Designers need to respond. The first portion of this ongoing studio project has focused on inventory and mapping of the territories connected to the Lower Chao Phraya River, in effort to explore the confluences between physical elements in the landscape and cultural artifacts. This workshop will incorporate issues and topics raised in the paper presentations in mapping and visual representation of the Chao Phraya River |

Thailand is the country where 95% of population follows the Theravada tradition of Buddhism. According to the article, “The Role of Buddhism in Enhancing Environmental Philosophy and Psychology in the West Today” by Phil Brown, the author stated that “Buddhism provides all the essential elements for a relationship to the natural world characterized by respect, humility, care and compassion.” Thais are not different from other lay Buddhists around the world. Thais of different generations have been taught to understand, adapt, and appropriate themselves passively to both the constructed and natural environments. The slow

and simple approach to Thais’ way of living can still be seen outside of the metropolitan areas. In this light, one cannot deny its deeply rooted influence of the Buddhist teachings and philosophy on Thai people. The various forms of informal settlements can be found all around Thailand for more the reason of adaptation to different environmental conditions than financial reason. The three seasons of Thailand present its people with substantial shifts in temperature and humidity level within the cycle of each year. Thai architects and builders have long been on the quest to finding architectural solution which appropriately adapts to the environmental flux and serves different needs of the people.

NARIN PARANULAKSA & Traditional Thai-house typology is a great example of architectural solutions which deals with the issue of environmental shifts in Thailand. Raised floor, high pitched roof, semi outdoor spaces, and kit-of-parts construction are the main features which boast the success of the Thai house. However, the Thai house typology has unfortunately lost its regards due to the changing values and ideals of people in the society. For this workshop, students will be asked to investigate the downscaled architectural typology which shares similar philosophy in its capacity to adapt to the environment as the Thai house. Vendor’s carts of distinct characteristics and properties will be the workshop’s subject of investigation The economy of Thailand has long been driven by transactions which

PANNASAN SOMBUNTHAM took place at these small mobile units of architecture. Universally, the vendor’s carts are vehicles which incorporate spaces to store and display products while commuting to different locations. Not only have these small vehicles hosted the transactions between sellers and buyers on streets of Thailand, the lesser formal nature of these “shops” have also shaped the more contiguous social structure between individuals within communities of Thailand. Perhaps, the most apparent proof is in the way Thais generally address strangers as their family members including the vendors who pass by their front doors

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

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The Shape of Things SYMPOSIUM to Pass MOE EKAPOB & CAMILLE LACADEE Through the analysis of similarities

Anticipation is a form of critical paranoia where given or made up logics have to be pushed to their extremes. One by one. In order to be pursued, these logics are necessarily (to a certain degree) blind to each other. But if anticipating is to have a broadly open mind on what the possible futures could be, (un)anticipating is admitting the role that abstruse fate and human (mis)behaviours also have in the play. Amongst the iconic structures of Bangkok megalopolis are vestiges of previous disillusions. As our site for researches and speculations on the anterior futures to pass, we chose the Sathorn Unique, an abandoned child of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the never-completed residential skyscraper located near Saphan Taksin. Our workshop will explore the forms and organisations of plausible futures. Starting from researches on animals and humans behaviours in emergency situations, we will give shape to at least one scenario. The development of each scenario will include digital tools and fabrication. Our workshop will be hosted on and presented as a blog. This blog is opening now and could be used as a platform for further researches and ideas’ development.

and differences across cities from different disciplinary perspectives, the Design and Social Development Program focuses not primarily on the disciplines themselves but rather on how to build a common language

Events Schedule: DAY 1 City Explorations (visiting scholars, INDA faculty, and students) DAY 2 Paper Presentations and Discussion (open to the public) DAY 3 Workshops (visiting scholars, INDA faculty, and students) DAY 4 Workshop Presentations (visiting scholars, INDA faculty, and students) and planning for next international symposium in Buenos Aires.

SuperSkyWalk SCOTT DRAKE In February 2011, the Bangkok Metropolitan

Administration

announced that it would construct a ‘Superskywalk” system, consisting of 50 km of clutter- free, elevated walking space. The project, with an estimated cost at Bt15 Billion, and

a construction schedule spanning 4 years, would make Bangkok more pedestrian friendly. Most sections of the project would link to the existing BTS skytrain, extending existing pedestrian skywalks such as that between Chit Lom and Siam stations. Curiously, a year after the announcement, little more has been said about the project. Clearly Bangkok’s pedestrian network needs attention – sidewalks are in bad repair, cluttered with vendors and food carts, and fi lled with obstacles |

& PREECHAYA SITTIPUNT such as fire hydrants and low level signs. Street crossings are dangerous, with cars and motorcycles seeming reluctant to wait for green lights or give way to pedestrians. But are pedestrians likely to ascend above street level to avoid such obstacles? Yes the streets are cluttered, but this is part of their attraction – cheap food and an endless parade of characters for entertainment. In contrast, the existing raised walkways are mainly circulation spaces – clean and corporate, engineered to be safe yet without provision for pedestrians to linger or enjoy the city. This workshop will explore possibilities for a Superskywalk – how could it be designed to be inviting and interesting for pedestrians? How could it be fi lled with vendors and food carts without becoming cluttered and dangerous? How could it link to existing areas where street culture is lively to make a multi-level pedestrian experience? The workshop will reflect on another design for a Super Skywalk, created by Supermachine Studio, comprising a giant ‘mega-compound’ raised above a city overcome by flood

RESEARCH CHAPTERS 1. report from flood -insects’behaviors in flood situations -human emergency reactions (save your skin….) -thai inventiveness and tolerance to flood 2. global weather report -fore and future cast -predictions 3. energy optimization -can we optimize a violent natural phenomenon? (thunderstorms, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods….) -case studies : Venice (Bangkok is the venice of the east), Nile river in Egypt … 4. Bangkok’s traces of previous crisis -catalogue of the abandoned structures (urban new ruins) -(un)anticipation of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 -case study of the Sathorn Unique near Saphan Taksin (research + 3d model)

following an idea by FRANCOIS ROCHE AND CAMILLE LACADEE HT TP:// W W W.NEW-T ER R I TOR IES.COM/ BK K / U NA N T ICIPAT ED/

FORMS OF GOVERNMENT 1. anarchy no ruler (different from all rulers (ochlocracy)…) 2. autocracy one ruler 3. technocracy science is the ruler 4. plutocracy money is the ruler (the economical power – could be banks, businesses, investment plans, etc. and not necessarily ”the rich class”) - workshop

outcome unsuited | Chulalongkorn University | Faculty of Architecture International Program in Design + Architecture Office | Room 409, Architecture Buillding Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 THAILAND |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

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Experiencing

JAPAN KERRIE BUTTS

The first-hand experience of architecture is not replaced by representation in photographs and drawings. Students will take a trip to Japan to study both historic and contemporary architecture, urban design and landscape architecture. Photos from Experiencing Architecture Japan 2010 can be viewed at http:// www.flickr.com/photos/indajapan/ The three-week long class will be organized into three stages – Pre, During, Post stages. Prior to the trip, we will visit various sites around Bangkok to sketch. During stage will take place over ten days in Japan, student will be asked to collect and document information based on assigned topics or themes given by the instructor before the trip. After returning from Japan, students enter the output stage. Student will spend an additional week to produce a combination of photography, sketches, essay and analysis diagrams for publication and exhibition. - Day 1 Travel to Tokyo Orientation and Exploration - Day 2 National Museum of Western Art Le Corbusier Ginza District - Day 3 Tokyo University Architecture Building Tokyo Fukutake Hall Tadao Ando Gardens/Lakes Yokohama Yokohama Passenger Terminal Foreign Office Architects - Day 4 Omotesando Hill/ Harajuku District National Olympic Stadium Mitsuo Katayama Tokyo Spiral Building Fumihiko Maki Shibuya Station Extension Tadao Ando - Day 5 Free time-morning PM Train to Osaka Osaka New Hankyu Hotel - Day 6 Kyoto JR Station Hiroshi Hara Kyoto Tower Makoto Tanahashi Kyoto Higashi Hongan-Ji Shin Buddhist Temple Shoseien Garden Pond Stroll Garden Sanjusangen-do temple 13th Century Buddhist Temple - Day 7 Ryoan-ji Temple and Garden Zen Garden Kinkakuji Temple “Golden Pavilion” Zen Temple - Day 8 Water Temple Tadao Ando Tues May 29 Awaji Yumebutai Tadao Ando Awaji Island - Day 9 National Museum of Art, Osaka Arata Isozaki - Day 10Kansai Airport Renzo Piano |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

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MACAU > Meta-Realities LARA LESMES & FREDRIK HELLBERG “Cheap and cheerful.” “It’s soooooooooooooo beautiful ... ” “If Venice is 300DPI, The Venetian is 72DPI” “I feel like puking if I see that golden sphere again.” “This is part of the Feng Shui war between Adelson and Stanley Haw” “The economic life of this buildings will always stand over the physical life.” “I’m sure you could get a job on this city just by sitting looking smart with drawings, just like this.” “I’ve lost my WOW map.” “Everything is a Kodak moment. Oh well,you don’t know what Kodak is.” “I know the toilets have water flowing to wash away the luck.” “It was done by the way-finding expert who did Jerusalem.” “Then you are stepping on precious gems and gold.” “I could tell you what we should’t have built…” “I’m not walking 20 minutes just for dinner.” “Well in Veigas this is what we do.” “Jackie Chan owns 30% of this?” “Is just there for bad luck.” “We are underwater!”

Students Lapassanan Buranapatpakorn Phittawat Chittapraneerat Pimchanok Kimsawat Thanawat Phituksithkasem Nattakan Thiamkeerakul Chinnapat Wattanasombat Jirachaya Kerdpanya Supavit Kerivananukul Pisut Phumchaosuan Phakthana Preedawiphat Bunyawat Prasitdumrong Nalinnipha Yala Kittitat Jiranapapan Nichakamol Horungruang Verasu Saetae Varis Niwatsakul

and casinos. As the world is colonized by consumer complexes such as the casinos of Macau, architects gaze with apathy.

Like cities, these single, endless, seamless and sealed buildings grows at ever increasing speed, reaching beyond our comprehension. Limitless, disorienting, glittering, desirable, revolting, impossible to ignore, yet impossible to understand, they are indisputably a new species of building, nameless and wild. These spaces and buildings are a new frontier in architecture, and we will be its explorers. Inside one single building one can travel through time as medieval Venice blends with modern sport stadiums, stroll across continents as the port of Amsterdam merges with the beaches of the Italian Riviera, and defy gravity as you play golf on the rooftop of the largest casino floor in the world. Turned inwards, these buildings are pure guts. The exterior is no more than a sign, a wallpapered advertisement of what can be found inside. A container to keep the daylight out. And once inside, you will find no connections with the outside world. The spaces are pure language, references to known atmospheres. Abstraction has very little place in the semiotic environments of the casinos of Macau. The light, the materials, the colours, everything has been carefully selected to bring the occupant to a meta-reality, a reality of a reality. Be it Medieval Venice or the Tang Dynasty. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, say about their book Learning from Las Vegas1 that it is a “treatise on symbolism in architecture.” In the book Las Vegas is analyzed as a phenomenon of architectural communication. The ‘Strip’ is architecture of communication over space, achieved through style and signs. Venturi and Scott Brown read Las Vegas from the outside, we will read Macau from the inside. The communication of spaces, over the communication of architecture. We will learn from Learning from Las Vegas, and from the theory of semiotics and iconography to gain cerebral powers to be able to read the spaces of language, the meta-realities of Macau. Few eras of architecture has caused so much confusion and lack of self confidence in architecture as the conditioned entertainment spaces of malls

“There was a whole language developed by the sky-art team: give it a puff, some swirls, needs a booze and a squirt.” “The more you pay, the more intense the experience gets.” “I’m the one who paints smileys on the ecstasy pills” “We are waiting for a change towards Las Vegas.” “Getting lost IS the point.” “I want his job.” “There is an H&M!!!!!” “Adelson liked my ponytail.” “I have an issue with gambling.” “I’ve been following people for 3 days.” “Oh, and this is the streetmosphere people.” “I can tell you that Venice is still the real deal.” “It takes 16 minutes to have lunch at the casino.” “You see that guy over there? I’ve seen him be born.” “We don’t do theming, we do progressive architecture.” “The new Sands is a repulsive mix of Tibet meets Northern China.” “When I build my house the door will be like this one, shhhhuuuum.” “The Chinese customer does not care about design or cleanliness but food.”

In Rem Koolhaas’ text, JunkSpace2 he openly blames architects lack of understanding space for the “punishment of conditioned spaces”. He argues that architects have only been looking at the containers of space. “As if space itself is invisible, all theory for the production of space is based on an obsessive preoccupation with its opposites: substance and objects i.e. architecture”. While the programs of malls and casinos is purely internal. The content is space, not structure. The negative space created by the windowless walls, the ornamental ceilings, and the edgeless floor becomes the positive, and the structure the negative.

Onchanok Nawapruek Nattakritta Lertpunyaroj Chakkraphob Sermphasit Chayothorn Songtirapunya Nitiwath Thipakkarayod Wish Vitayathanagorn Nathakit Sae‐Tan Collaborators Matthew Pryor Evelyn Lau (The Venetian, Macau), Colin Stagg (Aedes), Philip Lai (Arup HK), Keith Yates (Yates and Partners), Bob Hlusak, Frank McGoldrick (Architectonica), Kristoffer Luczak (City of Dreams).

We will focus our ambitious task on three cases. The City of Dreams casino and hotel complex opened in 2009. Home of the world’s largest water theatre, three major hotels in four towers, a three-floor podium including a mega-casino, over 200 shopping facilities and hotel guest facilities. Fisherman’s Wharf Theme Park opened in 2006. The complex includes over 150 stores and restaurants in buildings built in the style of different world seaports such as Cape Town, Amsterdam and Venice, six rides, a slots hall, a 72-room hotel, and a casino themed on coastal towns including Miami, Cape Town, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Venice, Spain, Portugal and the Italian Riviera. Last but not least, the immense Venetian Macau Casino and Hotel opened in 2007. The Venetian, modelled on its sister complex in Las Vegas, USA (in its turn modelled on Venice, Italy) is the largest single structure hotel building in Asia, the sixth-largest building in the world, the Venetian covers an area of 980,000 m2, more than 3000 suites, 110,000 m2 of convention space, 150,000 m2 of retail, 51,000 m2 of casino space – with 3400 slot machines, 800 gambling tables and a 15,000 seat arena for entertainment/sports events. Through conversations, interviews, observations and measuring these limitless spaces will become tangible, readable, so that we can, after our return in Bangkok, produce drawings, 3D models, texts, diagrams etc. and gain understanding into the marvel of meta-realities and reach conclusions concerning their meaning, their influence, and their future.

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ETH meets INDA RESISTANCE AND RESILENCE: THE ECOLOGY OF BANGKOK The recent flooding in Thailand exemplifies how assertions of control in a context of rapid ecological, economic, and social change have reached their limit of plausibility. Bangkok, like many low-lying coastal megacities in Asia, is at risk to future ramifications of climate change. Those living in informal settlements are most vulnerable to the effect of natural and manmade disasters, which calls for new strategies for resilience. INTRODUCTION Thirteen percent of the world population resides in low-lying coastal cities, with thirteen of the twentieth largest cities located in at-risk coastal areas. These metropolitan regions serve as vital economic centers for some of the most densely populated regions on the planet and are the most vulnerable to the future effects of climate change. This decade has witnessed an increase in the intensity and frequency of the extremes of flood and drought. In 2011, aboveaverage rainfall in Southeast Asia led to major flooding in Cambodia, Laos, Philippines and Thailand affecting more than 8 million people1. The devastation from the recent flooding of the Chao Phraya River and neighboring watersheds has brought to international attention the desperate need for coordinated water management practices throughout Thailand and across political borders. Global sea level rise and localized land subsidence amplify the perils to Bangkok metropolitan area and surrounding infrastructure. Although the immense scale of the inundation impacts all income levels, the poor are the most directly and severely affected by these flood disasters. Individuals living in dense poor communities are twice as likely to experience the hardship of future flooding which often last for periods of one week to over a month2. Residents of the informal settlements in these at-risk zones suffer the most during calamity due to, in part, insufficient emergency support systems and disruption to household income streams. WATERY GROUND Urbanization has led to the paving over of natural waterways and introduction of large amounts of impervious surfaces in Bangkok. Rigid infrastructure systems and modern settlement patterns in the region have neglected traditionally respected rhythms of the annual rainy season and ensuing swelling of the Chao Phraya River. Since the |

nineteenth century, there has been a shift in Thailand from a cyclical relationship with nature to imported values of control and dominance. Foreign-trained Siamese and European master builders sought to remake Bangkok through the promotion of land use separation and engineering solutions to exert dominance over natural cycles3. The recent flooding in Thailand exemplifies how assertions of control amid rapid ecological, economic, and social change have reached their limit of plausibility. Longstanding political differences also heighten disparity between rural and urban settlements regarding water diversion and natural disaster response. Challenges arise in predicting and quantifying the impact of a fifty-year flood event in a context of rapid change when the city has transformed drastically the span of a few decades. Future mitigation plans must embrace resilient and flexible strategies.

“In 2011, above-average rainfall in Southeast Asia led to major ﬂooding in Cambodia, Laos, Philippines and Thailand aﬀecting more than 8 million people1.” Bangkok and its surrounding heavily industrialized districts in the central delta form a sprawling megalopolis of 20 million people. It is by far the largest urbanized area in Thailand and the backbone of the national economy. Little enforceable regulations dictate what is built where leading to a built environment that is largely shaped by capital forces. This raises issues of social and environmental justice and questions of the longterm sustainability of Bangkok. The pumping of below ground aquifers to supply the growing region with water cause land subsidence at a rate of 25 cm per year while rising sea levels continue to eat away at the coastline. Household waste flowing directly into the public waterways produces quality of life and health concerns. Poor water quality shifts patterns of circulation and orientation away from the canals, creating a back-ofhouse condition along waterways

KERRIE BUTTS & NILAY MISTRY that were once major thoroughfares. In Bangkok, informal communities often concentrate around canals as well as railways, and public right of ways or unused lots. In many cases, slum dwellers have been successful to negotiate with landowners to create landsharing agreements and secure tenure. Community Organization Development Institute (CODI) is an independent public organization that coordinated with city, municipal agencies, NGOs, and community networks. It manages government subsidies for community upgrading and oversees the Baan Mankong “secure housing” program. CODI has currently improved conditions in 1,546 settlements in 277 cities. Bang Bua is the first canal-wide community-upgrading project in Bangkok involving a network of 12 squatter communities living along a 13-kilometer stretch of the Bang Bua canal. The community network began with collective efforts to clean the polluted canal water by removing trash and selling the salvageable material to support further upgrades. Household septic systems and grease traps were installed to preserve the waterway. The residents were able to negotiate a thirtyyear land lease from the Treasury Department who owns the property. Small self-organized groups manage the savings program, ongoing reblocking and new home construction with the assistance of governmental and university groups5. Homes that backed the canal were relocated to provide a shared public waterway. Despite upgrading to the housing stock, communities like Bang Bua are still vulnerable to flooding due to proximity to the canal. During the extensive flooding in 2011, the flow of water from northern districts deposited new waste into the canal and between housing units. Most of the homes received 30-50 centimeters of floodwater in 2011, during which many of the residents were driven to relocate to the second floor of structures. KHLONG TOEI SOCIAL HISTORY Flat, wet, and located at the end of multiple urban canals, Khlong Toei illustrates the problems of Bangkok amplified. An estimated 80,000100,000 residents live on 1.5 sq km of swampy low-lying land owned by the Port Authority of Thailand. Many families have been living on the site for four to five decades. The Khlong Toei community operates its own schools, volunteer fire department and medical clinics. Land tenure under Thai laws allow limited rights to squatters on public land, most

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOPS }

@ S.L.U.M. LAB houses have basic amenities such as running water and electricity. Waste management and stormwater, both runoff and septic, remain ongoing problems. Despite the long-standing presence on the site and being the closest possible source of labor for the port, there is lack of future certainty of port the community’s stake to the land. Deep-sea ports and industrial activities relocated east of Bangkok so the Khlong Toei port has lost importance in recent years. Rumors of port privatization would allow high rise development to push people off of this land. There is a need for alternative forms of income since local laborers cannot rely primarily on the port for steady employment and a necessity to strengthen additional industries for alternative forms of income generation. With the context of land tenure and land sharing, how can architectural proposals meet the needs of formal and informal sectors?

INDA + ETH ZURICH + U-TT During the Fall 2011 semester, the

International

Program

Design and Architecture (INDA) at

Chulalongkorn

University

INDA Staff Aj Nilay Mistry Aj. Kerrie Butts

collaborated with ETH Zurich to investigate urban transformations in Khlong Toei, Bangkok. The INDA

INDA Students

studio taught by Kerrie Butts and Nilay Mistry employed analysis of

the

conditions

surrounding

informal urbanism in Thailand and proposes

architectural

projects

exploring flexibility, adaptation and transformation. Reacting to those conditions in Khlong Toei area is part

Itthi Poldeenana Nithidon Kangsanan Thiparat Santaannop Dawit Prapayont Nitayaporn Sithiprasasana

of their ongoing research on informal urbanism in Bangkok. Successful architecture

and

interventions

Ratipan Panpinij Sirichat Siriwatwimol

within the urban context often rely on facilitating a multitude of programs, users, and infrastructures at

varying

timescales.

INDA

student work included in this

Attachai Luangamornlert Apanee Wongsakon Tadyanee Koranee

publication addresses issues of waste ADAPTATION In times of crisis, Thailand’s citizens display inventiveness and adaptation while communities work together to survive. Designers and academic institutions need to respond with similar vigor. With the issues of sea level rise, extreme weather, and political instability facing Thailand in the 21st century, new models of architecture interventions need to question existing typologies, in order to maintain long term contributions to the city. Unfinished relics from past real estate booms loom near cranes assembling a new generation of single use generic condominiums and globally franchised retail outlets. Increased development of condo projects within Bangkok isolated themselves from the dynamic and sentient qualities of the common Bangkok street. Long-standing as well as recently formed informal settlements within Thailand exemplify adaption and ingenuity to maintain survival through a variety of socio-economic cycles. Located in relationship to a catalog of public infrastructures and land uses within Thailand, can attributes of informal settlements be enhanced to improve their interface with the formal city? Large-scale governmental efforts to reroute water from the northern watershed around Bangkok while citizens use sandbags, masonry walls, and sheet plastic to seal off their homes and automobiles. Blocking floodwaters at these varied scales is a temporary solution. New landscapes of occupation must manage water with site-specific strategies that will in turn alter the engagement people have with natural flux |

management, water processes and the barrier between the port and the adjacent population. Recognizing the cycles, networks and systems of the city create conditions for sustainable design from economic, natural and

ETH Zurich Staff Prof. Alfredo Brillembourg Michael Contento

social perspectives. Lindsey Sherman

ETH Zurich Students Petrus Aejmelaeus-Lindström Binta Anderegg Maria Seline Brenni Sources 1. OCHA. Southeast Asia: Flooding (as of 13 October 2011). < http:// oc haon l ine.un.org /Defau lt. aspx?alias=ochaonline.un.org/roap> (January 12, 2012). 2. The World Bank, Climate Risk and Adaption in Asian Coastal Megacities: A Synthesis Report. (Washington, DC: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2010), p. 30. 3. Povatong, Pirasri, Building Siwilai : Transformation of Architecture and Architectural Pricetice in Siam during the Reign of Rama V, 1868 1910. Doctorial Thesis, University of Michigan, 2011. 4. Shlomo Angel and Somsook Boonyabancha, “Land Sharing as an Alternative to Eviction” In Third World Planning Review, 10 (2) 1988. 5. For a more detailed description of CODI, Baan Mankong, and Bang Bua community upgrading, see www. codi.or.th.

Aita Caviezel Lionel Epiney Fabienne Hugi David Jenny Hans Leidescher Stefan Maier Andres Meier Lino Moser See Hong Quek Lukas Schlatter Hjalmar Schmid Emma van Helden Anouk Wetli Carlos Wezel Maja Zeller

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{ 11-12 INDA YEAR ONE }

HOLD IT! CONTAINING IMPOSSIBLE QUA Allyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Scream MONSTER! Alliya Suthikorncompee But what exactly makes a monster? In this project, the goal was to contain an object. The item I had chosen was an innocent looking baby doll. I wanted to explore the scope of what the doll could transform into, the potential it contained... And so for this project, I have made a monster factory.

molten plastic was inserted into a mold and rotated around until it covered the inside of the mold. After the mold is fully covered, it is left to cool off and then pulled out. Now what if things were to go wrong during this process? What would become of the doll? This brings back to my first question: What makes a monster? After nu merou s sketches and asking friends, I came to a conclusion. What we consider to be monstrous are things that are dramatically different from what we consider to be normal. A monster is something that frightens. We as people feel safest with things we are used to, therefore when something is different, it becomes frightening.

I first analyzed the doll; taking it apart to see how many parts it had and see how the parts came together. The doll was very simple, made up of a head, a body, two arms and legs. From this simpleness can come complications and spawn many different monsters. Next was to see how the doll was made. This particular doll was made by rotational molding where Kâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s RC Memorial Chayothorn Songtirapunya Chose and object, draw every aspect of if, explore it, be it. K chose a radio controlled car from his childhood. Not more than nine by four centimetres, out of order, broken antenna and missing body. Over the weeks K developed a new relationship with the old RC. He knew every spot-weld, every corner, all the electrical elements and all the imperfections. Gradually the RC got a new identity and K stared to see the old companion as a once living thing, that had now served its role in our consumer culture, with honour and dignity. For the last phase of the project K decided to carefully separate its parts and delicately treat them like the body parts of an ancient emperor recently discovered and that deserved celebration and monumentality. The parts were covered in silver and arranged into a new constellation forming a monument in honour of the RC. Before that K created these two ornamental plates that celebrates the beauty and simplicity in these cheap plastic casts. So replaceable, so special. |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR ONE } 30째

ALITIES

HOT

WHEELS In a short digital exercise, preceded by its analogue equivalent, students were taken through the intricacies of digital colour and basic pattern geometry which in combination resulted in this vibrating library of swirling colorful patterns.

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

DONE BY

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR ONE }

THE PIERS STING

DIAGRAMS

Garden of Time by Ballard) the diagrams created graphic codes that offered a new reading those texts, based on language or meaning patterns, text data, events described or even moods and time shifts. A high level of rigor was expected and certainly achieved, providing a set of analytical and technical tools crucial for the understanding and development of architectural projects.

Based on several stories (The Swimmer by John Cheever, Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, The Monkey’s Paw WW Jacobs and The

Students could from there move onto three-dimensional grounds without abandoning the abstractness required to bring meaning into

WIMMER DIAGRAM

gram of Merrill’s positive/negative action and result tŚŝůĞ ŚĞ ǁĂƐ ĨĂƌ ĨƌŽŵ ǇŽƵŶŐ ŚĞ ŚĂĚ ^>/ KtE ,/^ E/^d Z ƚŚĂƚ ŵŽƌŶŝŶŐ ĂŶĚ '/s E d, ZKE <^/ K& W,ZK /d ŽŶ ƚŚĞ ŚĂůů ƚĂďůĞ Ă ƐŵĂĐŬ͘

h Z Ğ D ŵ Ğ Ɵ Z ^ Ğ ƚŚ z K Ăǀ d/& ƚ Ś z^ ŶŽ K D ĚŝĚ d d ŚĞ E Žƌ t Ɛ Ŷ Kd Ăŵ ͘ E Ś Ğ ŝĚ ƌĂ Ğƌ Ě Ğ ' ƚŚ ,Ğ ƚŚ ŐĞƌ ƚŽ ůŝŶ ƚŽ

,d >/' ŶĞĚ Ě ƚŚĞ Ğ ĞǆƉůĂŝ ' ĂŶ ƚ ď &/E/E ĐŽƵůĚ ŶŽ KE EKd ĞƌǀĂƟŽŶ ǁĂƐ Ğ͘ ďƐ ,ŝƐ ůŝĨĞ ŝŶ ƚŚŝƐŽ ŽĨ ĞƐĐĂƉ ŽŬ ŽŶ ŚĞ ƚŽ ƵŐŐĞƐƟ Ɛ Ɛ ďǇ ŝƚ

UCKSANANONT

,Ğ ƐǁĂŵ ,Ğ ǁĂƐ Ě Ă ,KWW Ɛ ĚĞĞƚĞƌ ƚĞƌŵŝŶĞĚ z Z t> ĞĚůǇ ĂŶĚ ŵŽĚĞƐ ŵŝŶ ůǇ Ž ŽƌŝŐ ͘ ƌŝŐŝŶ ŝŶĂů Ăů Ă ĂŶĚ ŶĚ Ś ŚĂĚ Ă Ă ǀĂŐƵ &/'hZ ͘ ƚ ŝĚĞĂ ŽĨ ŚŝŵƐĞůĨ Ğ ĂƐ Ă > ' E Zz ,Ğ , E / E ǁŚŽ Ě ŝĚ ŶŽƚ Ś yW>/ > zŽƵ ŵ KEd Ƶƌů ,Ğ ƚŽ , ƚŚĞŵ ƚŽŽŬ , t ŝŐŚƚ ŚĂǀĞ t ƐĞůǀĞƐ ŝŶ DWd ĨŽƌ ŵ Žī ^ d, ŚŝƐ Ɛ ŶƚŽ KE ĞŶ ƚŽ Ɖ , ŚŽƵů Ă ƐǁĞĂƚ ƉŽŽůƐ Z s/ ,/ ĚĞƌ Ă . Ğƌ ,Ğ ŶĚ ƚŚĂƚ ǁ t ^ ^ Z d/D K& & /& , ZK Kh , D Ks / ĂƐ ŚƵŶ Ͳ , K/^d E͘ Z > < E K > W> z͕ Ő ŽǀĞ E s ,/D z &K t ƌ Z h dŚĞ K>͘ E͕ KZ ^ ^ d >& h ƌƌĞĞŵ ŽŶůǇ , W KE ŵĂ > d, > Ğŵď ŵ Z d, & Z ĞƌĞ ƉƐƐ ĂŶ Z Ě h DĂ ^^d EK Žƌ Ě ĐŚĂ Z E h' ŝŵĂ ƌƚ ŐĂǀ ŬŝŶŐ ŽĨ ƚŚ /E' ,͘ ŐŝŶ Ɛ ŚĞ ĂƌǇ ŚĂ E Ğ Śŝŵ ŚŝƐ ǁ ƉĂƚ Ğ ŚŝŐŚ Z & ͘ ďƵ Ě ƚ ĐŚ ,Ğ yW ƚŚ ĂǇ Ś ƚ ƚŚ Ž ŐŽ , ĞƐ Ͳ ǁĂǇ Ͳ ď KKd ŝŶ >K Ğ ĨĞ Žŵ ĞƐĞ ďǇ ^ D yW > ŬŶ ƚŚ ĞĞ Z ǁĞ ǁĞ KE Ğǁ W K^ ƌ ĐĂŶ Ğ ĚĞƉ Z͕ ĞůŝŶŐ Ğ ďǇ ƌĞ ƌƌĞ D ƚŚ Ă ' d ƚŚ /d/& dK Ɛ͕ƌĂŐƐ ŽƐŝƚƐ Ŷ Ƶ Ăƚ ^> ƵƌŝŶ Ă h>͘ >> < , ŝ ͕ ď ƚ Ś E t , ŶĐŽ t ŚĞ /W Ő ƚ /E ůŽǁŽ ƚŚ Ƶ ^ K /d, t ŵŵ z ǁ t Ğ Ƶ & Z/ ƚ ͘ ŽƵůĚ ^ ŽŶ z Ɖ ,Ğ / h ͘ &/E ƌŽ ^ W/>>' ƌŽƵ ŚĂ > ͕ ƚĞ d Ă Ăƌ Ě Ŭ /E Ɖ & Ezz͘ Z/D ŝŽ K Ăƌƚ Ž ŶŽǁ ͕ ƵƐ Z/ E Ĩ ƌĞ Ŷ E d, &ZK ŚŝƐ ƵŶ ũ ǁŚ ^ ^ hD Ed ŽƵƌŶ ĞŶ Ś ŝŽ >> ŶƐ D t ĞǇ Ͳ Ğ ƐƚĂ ŚŚ Zz /d, ŝƚ Ś ƌƚĞ Ğ ǁ >/' d, ĂĚ Ě ƚ ĂƐ ,d͕ > ďĞ ŚĂƚ Ăď , /E ĞŶ Ž ƚŚ , &K ^ K Ŷ Ś ŝƐ ǁ ůĞ ƚŽ t t hE & d ŝƐ ŵ ĂƐ , Z & /' ^ d ^ > Ă /D &/ ƉƐ Ͳ E/d ,Z h ^ h ďƵ >& h Z ƚ z K Kt ', EW /E' Z , E d d Z hD d , ͕ : W Z KZ /D͕ Z ͘ dK E d͕ , Z/E ' d , Z K d E E , K ^/d h d/K E͘

Diagramming logic was a main force driving the second semester of first year design course. From abstract approaches students were able to develop very thorough systems for representing chosen parameters and provide new readings, both practical and critical, that opened for the development of thinking tools and personal representation esthetics and methods.

d/Z

d, E' Z ŚĞ ^d Ŷ ƚ ,/^ Ő ĚŽǁ Ŷ͘ KZ Ƶ , & ŝĚŝŶ Ɛ͛ Ɛ h ŝƐ͕ Ɛů ĂǌǇ Ś D ƌŚ KK Ě ƚ ƐƚĞ Ɛ d ĞƐƐĞ tĞ ͕ ǁĂ Ğ ŐƵ ƚŚĞ ĞƐ ŽƐ ǁŝŵ Ăǀ ŝŶ ƌ ƌ Ğ Ɛ Ğ Ś ŶŐ dŚ ůĚ Ś Ő Ɛŝƫ ŚĞ Žŵ ĐŽƵ ƌŶŝŶ Ğ Ĩ ƌ ƚŚ ŵŽ ƵƵƉ ͘ ^d Ő D ŝŶ W > ŽŬ /E' KD Z ůŽ z͘ ^, d Ğƌ͕ D t > EK ŵ /D Z ^W ŵ ,/^ h> Śŝŵ ,Ă ^t K ĂƌƌĚ ƌƐ͘ Śŝŵ ŽƵ Ğ Ǉ ^ Ś ͘ ƚ h D ǁ E ƌƐƐ Ś ŽǁƐ ŚĂ Zz Ey/K E ƐĂ ĞĂ ŝĚ ƚ K Zh ƚ͕ Ğ > ŝŶĚ ƐĂ >d dŚ ĞŶ ǁ ĚĂ ŵĞŶ Z^ d/ ' & ĐŝŶ ĚŝĞ͘ ŵŽ s ŽƉ ,/^ > >Ƶ Žƌ Ă z KE ͘ ĞŶ ƚ /͛Ě ' ĂĂƌ ĨĨŽ tŚ ŽƵŐŚ ĞĞ ď </E E sKz ƚŚ ƚ /^ ŚĞ / ƚŚ ŽĚ ď d ^dh z , ĚĞĚ d, ƐƚŽ > ƌƌŽƵŶ ,Ğ dK ' > Ĩ ŝƚ ǁĂƐ s Ğ ƐƵ h d ŽƌƐƚ Ž ƚŽ ď EK tK ddŚĞ ǁ D/',d E ŽƵƚ ƚ ďŽ , Ğ ĂĂď ͘ d, d ŵĞĚ d, d ƐĞĞĞĞŵ Ŷ ŚĞ ^t D /E<͘ tŚĞ /E E &d, Z ^^͘ &/ s > K , KZ ,/^ ' KhZd Dd/ ŚŝƐ & Ğƌ ĂŶĚ //ƚ ǁĂƐ ŚŽƵůĚ ŶŐ Ě ŚŝƐ Ɛ ďĞĞŶ Ă ƐŽŵĞƚŚŝ ŚĞĂƌĚ ŚĞĂ Ś ,Ğ ďƌĂĐĞ dŚĞƌĞ ŚĂƐŶ͛ƚ Ő Ś ǀŝŶŐ ŚĞ ŚĂǀŝŶ ƌ ŚĂ Ğƌ Ś ďĞƌ ŵďĞ ŵĞĞŵď ƌĞŵ hd d, ,Ğ ƐĞĞŵĞƐ ƚŽ ĚůĞǇƐ ĂŶĚ ƚŚĞŝƌ ŚŽƌƐĞ ĂďŽƵƚ ƚŚĞ >ŝŶ ^ hE > Z͘ t D DKZz E

> K

ĂƐ Ğ ǁ

EĞĚ Ĩ Ğůƚ Ă ƚĞŶ Ă ƉĂƐƐŝŶŐ ĚĞ ^KD ƌŶĞƐƐ ĨŽƌ ĂīĞĐƟŽŶ Ĩ d,/E' ƚŚ Žƌ , D Ğ ŐĂƚĞŚƌŝŶŐ ƚŚĞ ƐĐĞŶĞ /',d ͕ dKh ͕ ĂƐ ŝĨ ŝƚ ǁ ĂƐ ,͘

tŚĞŶ ŚĂĚ ŚĞ ůĂƐƚ ŚĞĂƌĚ ĨƌŽŵ ƚŚĞ tĞůĐŚĞƌƐ Ͳ ǁŚĞŶ ŚĞ ĂŶĚ >ƵĐŝŶĚĂ ůĂƐƚ Z 'Z dd E ĞŶ ŚĞ ĂŶĚ >ƵĐŝŶĚĂ ůĂƐƚ Z 'Z dd E ĚĂ ůĂĂƐƚ Z 'Z dd Z 'Z dd E /Es/d d/KE dK /E t/d, d, D͍

ƚ ŽŵĞŶ

ƚŚĞ ŵ ^ Ăƚ ͘ W> ͕ E Zzd,/E' > E ĞĚ͕ ^ t/d, s >d Ɵƌ ,Ğ & ŽŶĞ͖ W> Ăů ƚŽ ďĞ

,Ğ ^d '' Z ǁŝƚŚ ǁĂǇ ƚŽ ƚŚĞ ůǇĚĞ͛Ɛ Ă ĨĂƟŐƵĞ ŽŶ ŚŝƐ ůĞŶŐƚŚ ŽĨ ƚŚĞŝƌ ƉŽŽů ƉĂĚĚůĞĚ ƚŚĞ ͕ ǁŝƚŚ ŚŝƐ ŚĂŶĚ ŽŶ ƚŚĞ ĐƵƌď ƚŽ ƌĞƐƚ

Ŷ ^ ŚĞ ǁ ƌď D Ƶƚ ĐƵ Z ů͕ ď ŚĞ /^ ŽŽ ƚŽ ƚ E , Ğ Ɖ Ŷ , / ƚŚ Ɖ Ž 'd Ăŵ ĞůĨ Ƶ Z E ͘ Ɛǁ Ɛ ^d KE ŶĚ ů Śŝŵ , ' Ŷ Ă ĂƵ d Ğ ŝ Ś d , Z^ Žǀ Ž , Z^ Ě Ě ƚ d D KZ ,Ğ ƚƌŝĞ hE h> /D ĞŶ ƌĞ ^ ďĞ &K ,K ďĞ ƚ Ă , ^ ĂĚ ƌŽĂ Ğ Ś ƚŚ E ŝƐ ͕ Ś ŶŐ ŶĚ Ś ͟ ůŽ Kh ŽŽ ƐĞ Ă z ŵ ƚ ŶŽ ^ ǁƵ ŚŝƐ <͕ Ě Ɛ ŶĚ /E dK ŚĂ Ő͕ Ă ƚĞƌ͘ >z Z ͘ ,Ğ ůŽŶ Ğ ǁĂ / ƚŚĂƚ D /E< /D ZZ ůŝĨĞ ƚŽŽ ŵ ƚŚ , Z d ŚŝƐ ĨƌŽ d^ Ğƌƌ͘ Ğ ŝŶ '/s /D Ɵŵ E ƵůĚ dK , ƌƐƚ K> ͕ t ƐŚŽ /s // t Ǉ Ɛ ŚĞ Į > ͕ KZ K ' ŶĚ ŚŝƐŝ ƚŚĞ z͘ d E ƚ ƚ Z d Ğ Z Ă Ă Ğƌ Ś /^ Z ͘ ,K WWz E ŶĚ Ǉ Ɛ͕ Ŷ ƚŽ ŝŶĚ Žǀ ĂĂ ƟŽŶ / dz ĞŐĂ ůƚ Ž D /> ƵĐ ŝĚ /' / > , && ŝƚĂ ,Ğ ď ǀĞƌ ĨĞ Ě t ͞> Ğ ƐƐĂ h ŝƌƌ ŝŝŶǀ , Z ^K Kh Ğ d /Z Ğ ŚŚ Z t Kh> ƌĞ ŚĞ ͕ ĂŶ ĞǇ z^ ƚ ƚŚ E , ĞǇ Ă d d/Z dŚ ĞǇ t > ŶĚ ŽƵ Z , K& d Ͳ ƚŚ /^ /^d >t ͘ Ğ DW / ^ dŚ ^ d > ĞƌƌĞĞ ƐĞ Ɛƚ Ɵŵ Ğƌ Z/ z͛^ ^ Z Ǉ ǁ Ě ƚŽ K >/d Ğǀ ŚĞ Įƌ dŚĞ ƟŶƵĞ E' dK / ZZ Ğ ŚĂĚ ďĂďůǇ K E Z/^dD Ɛ ƉƌŽ ůŝĨĞ ƚŚĂƚ Ś ĐĐŽŽŶ t/>>>>/ Z d , ' d /ƚ ǁĂ KE ͛^ ĂĚƵůƚ >>K hE DK ŝŶ ŚŝƐ d /E hE EK >>h E E E ĚŝĚ KE E t ^ E dŚĞǇ E t d s D E EK d, ͟ Ɛ Ă Z/E<͕ ŶŐƚŚ , WW^ ƚŚĞ ǁĂ Ğ ĐůĞĂŶ ŝƚƐƐ ů ůĞĞŶ ͞͞W Z KZD Ğ E ƐǁĂŵ E& E tŚĂƚ Ś z͕ ĂŶĚ ƐŽŵ ƉŽŽů͕ Ɖ E/ h KDW E Ž ƚŚĞ ŶƚƚŽ ƐŽŵĞ s ŝ ŝŶ Ks d, ^͘ ,Ğ , ĚƌǇ >K ƚŚĞĞ Ăƚƚ ƚŚ ĞƐ Ă ƌŝĞƐ ͘ ũƵƌŝ ŶũƵ Ǉ ŝŶ , Z ŶǇ ŝ ĂŶǇ hZ h ƐƵīĞƌĞĚ Ă Kh > h> /Ĩ ŚĞ ŚĂĚ ͛ d, ůŝĨĞ͕ ŚĞ / ĞƌƐ͛ d, z t &Žƌ ƚŚĞ ĮƌƐƚ ƟŵĞ ŝŶ ŚŝƐ ƚŚĞ ƐƚĞƉƐ ŝƐǁĂŶŐ Z/E<͟ EKd /s ďƵƚ ǁĞŶƚ ĚŽǁŶ Ă ďŽďďůĞĚ '/s D > ' Kh> ŝŶƚŽ ŝĐǇ ƌŝǀĞƌ ĂŶĚ ƐǁĂƉ ͞zKh Kh ͞z ŚĂǀĞ ƐŝĚĞƐƚƌŽŬĞ ƚŚĂƚ ŚĞ ŵŝŐŚƚ ů͘ Ks ŝŶ ĂŶĚ ƐǁĂŵ ƚŚĞ ƉŽŽ ,Ğ Ks ,Ğ ůĞĂƌŶĞĚ ĂƐ Ă ǇŽƵƚŚ

W W ^d ƚ ŝƌ ŚĞ , ǁĞŶ Ŷ ƚ ŶĚ ŝů ŝ Ă ŚĞ ĞƚĂ ĨŽƌŵ ĞĨŽƌĞ Ă Ě ƌĞ ĂƐ ů ĨŽƌ E< ď ĚŐĞ Ğ h Ɛ ǁ Ă ĞƐ Ő ǌĞ /^ dZ ŚĞ Ś ƚ ĚŶ ŬĞ ŝƐŝŶ & , ŝŶ ŶĂ ŵ K ŝŶŐ Ğŝƌ ƉƌŽ hd ĞŶ dŚ ĐŽŵ >z K Ğ ŽƉ ƵŶ >/d Ś ƚŚ WK ƌŽƵŐ ƚŚ

,Ğ ǁĂ ĐŽ ǁĂ Ɛ ƚŚ ƵůĚŶ K ůů ƚŚ Ğ Ƶ ͛ƚ ƌĞ E^ Ăƚ ƉƉĞ ŵĞ / ƐƵ ƌ Ś ŵ Z ƌƌŽ ĂŶ ďĞ ƵŶ Ě ƌ͕ ŝ K Ě Ś ĂŶ ƚ ǁ & ^ Ğ Ě Ś ĂƐ > ƌ Ɖ Ğ Ɛ ŚĞ & ŽŽ ƚĞ ǁ KE ů ǁ ƉƉ ŚŽ &/ ŝƚŚ ĞĚ ƚ ŚĂ E ŶŽƚŚ ŚƌŽ Ě ď ƌŽ ͘ ŝŶŐ Ɛ ƵŐŚ ƚ ŬĞŶ Ž ŚĞ ŝƚ ŐĂ Žī ,Ğ ƚĞ ͕ ŚŝƐ ŽĨ ŝƚ ǁ ƐŚŽƵ ƚŚ ǁŝŶ ŝƚŚ Ś ƚĞĚ͕ Ɖ Ğ ĚŽ ŝƐ Ɛ Ž ǁƐ͕ ŚŽ ƵŶĚ ƐĂ ƵůĚĞ ĞĚ Ž ǁ ƚ ŚĂƚ ƌ͕ ĂŶĚ Ŷ ƚŚĞ ƚŚĞ ƚŚĞ ĚŽŽ ƉůĂ Ŷ ů ƌ ĐĞ ǁ ŽŽŬ ƚƌŝĞĚ ŝŶ ƚ ĂƐ Ő ŝŶ Ž ĨŽ ,Ğ Ğŵ ŚĂ ƉƚǇ Ăƚ ƚŚ ƌĐĞ ƚŚĞ Ě ĚŽŶĞ Ğ ͘ ĐŽ y, ƵŶƚǇ͕ď ǁŚĂƚ Ś h^d Ƶƚ Ğ >Ž /KE ŚĞ ǁ ǁĂŶƚĞ ƐƵƉ ǀĞͲƐĞ ƚŚĂƚ ĂƐ ƐŽ Ě͕ Ś Ğ ŚŝƐ ĐŽ ƌĞŵ ǆƵĂů ƚƌŝƵ ^dhW ŚĂĚ Ɛǁ ŵƉŚ &/ ŝŶƚŽ ůŽƌĞĚ Ğ Ğůŝ ƌŽƵŐ Ƶŵ ƐĞĞ t/d ŚŝƐ Ɖŝůů ǆŝƌ͕ ƚŚ ŚŚŽ ŵĞĚ , ƐƚĞ ƚŚĂ Ğ Ɖ ƵƐĞ ǀĂŐ Ɖ͕ ƚ ǁ ĂŝŶ ŝŶ Ĩ ƵĞ͘ ƚŚĞ ŽƵ Ă Ŭ ũŽ ůĚ Ɖ ŝůůĞƌ͕ Đƚ Ͳ ,Ğ Đů Ǉ Ž Ƶƚ ƚ ǁĂ ŝŵ Ś Ɛ Ĩ ůŝ ǁŽŶ ďĞĚ ƵƉ ƚŚ ĨĞ ŝ ƚŚĞ Ɛ Ğ ďƌŝ ƚŚĞ ĚĞ Ŷ Ś Ɖƌŝ ŐŚƚů ƚŽ ŐĞ ƌĞĚ ŝĨ ŚĞ Ś Ğ ůĂĚĚĞƌ Ă ŝƐ Ś ŶŐ ď Ǉ ƚ ŚŽŵ ŶĚ ĂĚ ƚŚ ĞĂ ĂĐ Ğ͘ Ğ ƐƚƌĞ ƌƚ͘ Ŭ ŶŐƚŚ

,Ğ ĚŽǀĞ ŝŶƚŽ ƚŚĞ ZKtE/E'͕ ŵĂĚ

t ^ ,/^ D DKZ /^ /W>/E /d / z & />/E' KZ , , ^K E d, Z WZ ^^/KE K& hEW> ^ Ed & D ' ,/^ ^ d^ d, d , , tŚĞŶ 'ƌ E^ K& dZhd, ĂĐĞ ͍ EĞĚ E EKd && d/ ŝƐǁĂ E ĚĚ ĚǇ ƌĞ ƌĞŵĞŵ Ğŵď KE d ŵď Ƶ ďĞĞƌƌĞĚ ƵŶ ŶŬŬŬĞ ĞĚ ŬĞƌ Ě ŚĞĞ ƐĂ Ě Ě ƚ ĞƌƐ ƌƐ͛ Ɛ ǁŝƚ Ɛ͛ ƐĂƉ ƐĂ ŝƚŚ ƚŚ ĂƉŚŚ Ś ůŽ ŵ ŐŐŚƚ ŵŝ ůŽ ŽŶ Ž ŚŝƌƌĞ Ś ŶŐŐŝŶ ŐŐŝŝŶ Śƚƚ ĐĐĐŽ ĞĞ Ăƚ ƚŚĞ Ğ Ă ŝŝŶŐŐŚ ĐŽŶ Ž ƚĂ Ś ĂŶ Ś Ă ƚŚ ƚĂŵ ŶĚ Ŷ Ğ ŵ ŵŝ ƚŚ ƚŚŽ ŝŶĂ ŝŶ WZK^^W WZ ŶĂĂĂƚĞ Ŷ ŽƵŐŐŚ ƚĞ ƚĞ ĞĞ Śŝŵ ŐŚƚ W Z W Śƚ ƚŚ ZKh^E Ăƚ ŵƐĞĞů ƚŚĂƚ ƚŚ ĞůĨ Ăƚƚƚ ŚĞ ůĨ Ͳ Ĩ Ͳ Ͳ D E ^^^^^ E ^ ^ D D ,Ğ E E ' ,/ ' , Z ,//^ /^ K ƌĞ ^ K Kt Kt ZD tE ͞tŚǇ ƚŚ W/> ŵŝŶĚĞ ŝƐ Ɖ Ăƌƚ Ă ' d Ě Śŝŝŵ ďĞŶĚ 'Z/D͕ Ă Z Ǉ ŚĂƐ Ğ ŵ ^, Z ŝŶ ŝŶ > ͕ ĂŶĚ ƚŚ ƐĞůĨ ƚŚĂƚ ͟ ƵĐŝŶ ,Ğ ĚĂ ƌ ĂŚƚ ƚŚŝ ďĞ ǁĂƐ ĐŚůŽ Ks ŝǀĞƌ Ɛ ǁĂƐ Ă ƌŝŶĞ ͕ ^ K ŵ ŵĞƌƌ Ŷ yW> ͘ t>/ t K ĞůǇ E' Ă Ɛƚ Z Z͕ /^< zKh ,/^ t/d ĂŐŶĂ K Ŷƚƚ , Z ZZz , z t E͛d &Z ,/D K /^d ^ h ^ D d ^dd d, > t / t , , K W z ͕ ŝ ͕ ŝŶ ,/^ Z t KE ƚŽ ƚ D & Kh' ZD ,Ğ ŚĞ > Z / /E , d, ,/D Ks t ' d & z hW ŝŝ dŚ Kh t , >> ^ h ͕ W Ğ ď ŶƚŽ ͛> Z d t / < K Ăƌƚ t d K K / ^Ă > ^^K ĞŶ h> ^ K & ,/^ ,/D ĚĞ ĐŚ > ZZ ' Z/' :K h ƌ ƐĞ ĞƐ '/s > zz z ŝ W ͛ h ͕ ƌǀĞ /E ĐŽ Kh ŝƚƚ͛ƐƐ D > ZE Ě Ś ůĚ ǁ ď ͘ ss ď z͕ ŝŵ Z ĞĞŶ ďƵ ĂƚƚĞ ,ŝƐ z ^ ƐƐŽ ƚ ď Z/E ƌ͘ ƐĐ ǁĂ Ğ Ɛ E< KK ůŽ Ğƌǀ ͘ ƚŚ ŽƌĞ͕ Ɛ Ă ǁ E ŶŐ Ă Ăƚ ĂŶ ďĞ Ě ƚ ŽƌůĚ ŶĚ ŚĂ Ž ď ŝŶ Ě ^ Ğ Z ǁŚ h& ŝĐŚ & h& ƚŚ Z & Ğ Đ ^ , Ă KD ďǇ Ă ƚĞƌĞ ƚŽ Ğ & > ƉĂ ƌ ͛Ɛ ŵ ď > Ğ Ă d d K^ ƌƚ Ɵ Ğ ^ K ŵ Ŷ Ŭ ůŽ /Z ŶĞ & ^ Ğ ď ĞƉƚ ͖ Ɖ ͕ Đ K ĂƌŬ ůĞĂ ůĞ / > ĞĞ ƐĞ ĂŶ͕ ^ Ɖ ǁ ĂŶ d ŝƚŚ Ě D Ğǀ ƉůĞ Ğƌ ĂƐ Ǉƚ Ğ Ă ŚŝŶ ƚ Ő͘ ƚŚĞ ŵ Žŵ ĞŶ ƚ

complex data. The diagrams jumped from 2D to 3D, and from there established the basis of a design project for a reading space in which the abstract qualities were to be utilised as tools for development and not for figurative purposes.

Canals have served as a vital means of irrigation, defense, and transportation in Thailand for centuries. As Bangkok rapidly developed in the twentieth century, most city canals were replaced by surface roads and modern drainage systems. The San Saeb Canal remains one of the few remaining canals in the city with a functioning public taxi system. Religious enclaves that predate the foundation of the city, royal palaces, and some of the most valuable commercial developments in Southeast Asia are separated by a few minutes along the San Saeb canal. The final project for first year design studio in the second semester explored the role of site and context in creating a spatial intervention. The studio collectively studied the San Saeb Canal corridor by focusing on a series of boat taxi piers that comprise an important transportation system for Bangkok. through group site investigation. Repeated visits, research, observation, and interviews took place during the first weeks, which informed thoughtful and creative interventions along the canal taxi route. Students were challenged to deliver an rich and understandable research document at a considerable scale (1:50) in wihch all relevant properties (such as light, views, sectional studies through site, activities and programs, pier user opinions, materials/textures/ furnishings, vegetation, wildlife, and water cycles, sounds / smells / microclimate, boat and pedestrian traffic and site history) were mapped out. Detailed site plans, sections and elevations were produced, together with large models and neccessary diagrams, all overlapped in complex documents that became the start point for the following design projects. Based on conclusions from the

site inventory and analysis the projects were developped answering questions such as, how the piers be designed to resolve negative issues on the site? How can you design a space that takes advantage of your site’s unique opportunities? While the primary function of a pier is to

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR ONE }

G ON BANGKOK’S CANALS best recipe: a lot of interest + enough excitement to combat tiredness + ambition + good mood = Great Work, from which we have chosen a few examples to show you: Palm, Nantawat Siritip, (up right) presents its interlocking pier ruled by “dependency” and “co-operation” as the site uniquely lies in between two different communities, the Bobae market traders and the Mahanak Muslim community. The pier operates from both sides. Thus, in order for the people to use the pier to its fullest function, the people from both sides need to cooperate the pier to form this interdependency bridge structure. The walkways also serves other function: on one side it contains vegetations platforms for the muslim community to create a sense of ownership, encouraging them to look after the pier and the canal as they feel it’s their own; on the other side the wooden panelling contains the water misting system for the customers who are waiting for the boat on the Bobae market side. When the bridge connects, the Bobae market sides reaps the benefit of getting the customers, while the water misting system became a watering system for the muslim community’s vegetations. Structurally forcing people to interact and co-operate creates a sense of ownership and encourages them to take care of the pier and its surroundings, a long-term solution to the canal’s pollution.

allow passengers an interface with taxi boats, how can new activities integrate with pier to create new interactions with this waterway? How can this space adapt to the changes to the context throughout the day, year, and generation? Projects varied from practical

to critical approaches, reaching overwhelmingly high levels of resolution and clarity. We found ourselves drown in models, covered in thousands of drawings, animations, collages, prototypes and anything imaginable during the whole semester, always following the

Mew, Praewa Samachai, (right centre) developped her self-destructive pier under the following tagline: “When architecture itself anticipates its own death... our assurance is shaken. Using the sun as the main source of energy, the pier re-adapts, re-shapes itself and eventually burns away, little by little, in accordance to its traffic.”

Gun, Guntana Thongpiyapoom, (down centre), designed a device for the transport of patients to several hospitals in Bangkok, after finding out that almost all mayor hospitals have direct access to the river and canal. It offers a much faster alternative to the car ambulances whilst keeping all the services and resolving/considering both technical and emotional issues that this new alternative might face.

To sum up we would just say:

Well done ﬁrst years!!!!

Saan, Wish Vitayathanagorn, (bottom right) made nothing but controlling the way trees would grow over the next 60 years, creating a canopy from which different activities hang. Every stage of the project was designed according to the growth of the local trees, modified through several devices that redirect its branches or alter natural conditions under an area to change its direction. |

22 DONE BY

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR TWO }

HOME The second semester for second year design studio was developped around the different ideas of home. Students did, throughout the project, gradually develop a subjective argument on the subject, answering questions such as: What does it mean to be home? What does it mean to have, or not to have a home? Does a home need to be a house? What follows is how this project was communicated to the students: 0 - Make Yourself at Home:

fairly orthogonal hollow volumes that we tend to call houses. We all eat, sleep, groom and watch TV there quite regularly. We also fi ll them with possessions that are rather important for us. And usually we share those premises with emotionally and/or blood related people that we could consider family. But is that house your Home? What does make Home for you? What does it mean to have, or not to have a Home? Where do you feel at Home? (are you Homeless?)

This semester will be dedicated to the topic of Home. We all live in

So now, please, make yourselves at Home. Right here, right now.”

b. FOR INSTANCE (CASE ST

a. MANIFESTO: The Home Manifesto project is a semester-long living declaration of ideas based on the subject of Home. The project’s main aim is to experiment with forming arguments through design. Every design manifests one’s ideas and positions towards specific topics. Through the design project we will redefine, reinvent and manifest the contemporary meaning of Home. We will develop design projects based on empirical research in the form of an illustrated manifesto. The manifesto will be updated and reshaped throughout the semester

and become also the representation format for the entire project. Every step taken in the design process will be an active part of your argument defining Home. Your first assignment is an Immediate Manifesto consisting of two parts: a written argument of no more than 150 words and a materialisation of such argument. Your presentation will consist of no more and no less than the strictly required materials.

c. LOUD FAST AND O Experiment. Get your hands dirty. Do. Break. Try! It’s been too long, we’ve been thinking too much, is time to get hands on. So far we have been carrying on research through study. Experimentation is another form of research. Experiments are triggered by a hypothesis and their result is unexpected and informative only. There is no room for disappointment in experimentation processes. If you know what the result should be, then you are making a representation, and now is not the time for it. |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR TWO }

TUDIES): Study an “instance” (case study: building, house, construction, structure, place, situation, person, family, state of mind etc) relevant to the conclusions from your immediate manifesto. The conclusions from the immediate manifesto might differ widely (wildly!) from the initial argument. The fact that it has to be related is not meant to be an obstacle that locks anyone to a 1-week argument, but is a condition to ensure that these initial explorations don’t get lost. The chosen instance should have clear spatial qualities to be studied although the starting point might not be a space but the conditions from which that space or program derives, as ephemeral, immaterial or unreachable these conditions might be. It should also be ensured that there is enough available research material enough to feed 2.5 weeks of work. The research will result in a rich collection of drawings concerning issues such as (for example) space, size, dimensions, materials, structure, sound, light, circulation, massing, energy, temporal and historical aspects, social and anthropological conditions, environment, climate, etc. This set of drawing should result on a comprehensive and focused understanding of the chosen instance in a clear direction. The instance will perform as a second manifesto, not because of what it is but because of the way in which it is studied. The chosen space might not have an obvious relation to your initial argument, but the way you study it and draw it will be the link between them.

OUT OF CONTROL (EXPERIMENT): Within the following days you will develop a series of models that initially may or may not relate to the ideas developed before, although links should be found before, during or after the experimentation process. This models should be treated as experiments and they must come in as series. The experiments can be done through formal, material or atmospheric means but they must explore physical modifications of space, and this has to be tested, documented and demonstrated. The choice of material and technology is free. Once the experiment is carried out a conclusion should |

be formulated, both verbally and graphically. The presentation will be in the form of a fast-show, taking place at studio 705 and its annex room during the studio time on the date listed below. Each of you will be free to chose space and create a set -if necessary- where all your work will be exhibited. No verbal presentation will be required since the aim of this part of the project is for it to remain as a modelling freestyle exercise but the exhibition should be informative in itself and clear enough to explain process and conclusion with no further verbal clarification.

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

DONE BY

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR TWO }

PARAMETERS : At this point you will have a clear vision and an individual stand on the subject of home. In order to now continue with your project you will need a series of parameters. Parameters are conditions to which design has to respond to or other external sources that inform design. Parameters are not problems to be resolved but triggers for creativity instead. They are not obstacles but opportunities. Parameters are not Facts. That a building has a structure is a design Fact, but if the structural system responds to an original idea and informs other aspects of the design process, then it becomes a design Parameter. Below is a list of parameters that are usually involved in design processes, either as Facts of as Parameters. Through your design process you will address a minimum of 5 of those parameters. Two of them will be given to you and will be a constant for the section. The other three are of your own choice, meaning that you are half-writing your own brief. - site (geographic conditions) - program (functioning conditions, typology) - size (surface area, volume, etc.) - client (founding source, producer) - target (inhabitant) - form (volumetric configuration, specific geometry) - belongings/collections (objects that need to be contained) - comfort/safety (specific conditions of security and comfort to be provided) - social condition (specific necessities given by a certain position in society) - emotional/physical condition (disabilities, superpowers, etc.) - technology (construction method, materials, machinery, structure, etc) - time (temporal context/condition) As a result of your choice, this 4th brief is tailored to your decisions taken on the previous steps and should result on a Space (building, house, monument, toilet, you name it) that carries within your manifestation of Home. This Space, together with everything youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve developed so far, is your Design Project, and will be your final manifesto illustration on the next and last 5th step.

Unused sed shophousee blocks blocc have been untilized by erefo it creates effective space other programs. Therefore, g usage.

After moving in here, Ms Chanida got an unused rooftop space and turns it into an activity venue for religious teachings. Children enjoy the scenery very much.

Ms. Chanidaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Activity Center

The Spirit Trees has become the new landmark of the plaza

Seang Kong Teak Huts

After the shophouse gets re-orieted, o e More lights can go in o more people. Therefore, more living units for

After mov moving vving here, here e Dam and San are very happy about using the basement of the s ass their h working g space. p The unused became used teak house used.

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR TWO }

e. RE - MANIFESTO : The exploration is reaching its pinnacle. In search of home you have revealed new and previously unknown issues regarding this imperative topic and now have the chance to make a final declaration. Enlightened by your discoveries and creations you will now re-evaluate your original manifesto, case study, experiments and design project and re-create your manifesto, by any means possible.

Communities in Bangkok sometimes are badly planned and built. Therefore, empty units in which people can move faces of their property in is a way to conserve and hybridize with others

Dome Plaza The dome used to be the signifier of the Mosque. Through leveling, it has turned into a landmark. The activities comprise of Siam Square’s Vendors, suan Luang Famous restaurants and other types of street vendings from different places. After moving into this complex, the Dome Plaza has been a perfect location for expanding Somchart’s desert business. He got customers who are fans of Siam Square Vendors. He often exchanges knowledge with people from the Muslim community. Now he made many new interesting inventions.

His silk business gains more value after his teak house and factory is combined with a shop house from Sam Yan and being in a complex with movie facility, exotic shopping and religious center. He has his own boutique on the empty blocks of shop houses.

Baan K

Boutiquee Bo

Tourist enjoys watching silk production d o and selecting silk Scala Theater and Muslim Education centerr Scala Theater still retains its function as a sscreen e for art movies d to tthe mosque and they lovers. However, a part is being dedicated a also s use the theater for share functions. Now, Religious leaders can education.

h h does not like it being partially r y turned into Mr. Thana, although n H t a is not a religious center, He is glad that his beloved theater s I fact, due to the higher concentration o e turned into ashes. In of m programs, thiss complex became more lively and g got its reincarnation.

Your Re-Manifesto will be a creative and hyper-relevant representation of your project and all its elements compressed into “one piece” expressing your term-long reflections on Home. It should be a piece that in both format and content formulates the argument. The wide time-frame allowed for the shaping of the final review should result on creative and hyper-relevant presentations that will touch the boundaries of performance and that, by themselves will express the term-long reflections on Home. An academic Gesamtkunstwerk!

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR THREE }

DONE BY

KNOWLEDGE RESOURCE CENTER Introduction to an urban context and public programs that concern larger contexts. Project requires more comprehensive organizational strategies,

scalar

adjacencies,

relationships,

reciprocity

between

form and function. Students will develop

understanding

for

representation and communication at

various

scales

for

building

systems within an urban context, using analytical diagramming, and advanced mapping techniques. Design Proposals should encourage the

sharing

and

creation

knowledge by bringing together traditional resources

book-based and

library

services

with

technologically advanced tools for the discovery, use, and effective presentation

information.

UNESCO selected Bangkok to be the Book Capital of the World for 2013 and the BMA also plans to promote reading and will launch a campaign to encourage citizens to read. The 2010 survey by the Publishers and

Booksellers

Association

Thailand (PUBAT) showed that Thais on average read the equivalent of just five books a year as compared with Malaysians who read on average 40 books a year, Singaporeans 45 books a year, and Japanese 50 books a year. Encouraging a lifelong, self-learning process accumulated from public knowledge resource centers is part of the mission of Thailandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Office of Knowledge Management and Development.

Their

objectives

include: -To provide facilities for learning that highlights the cultivation and promotion of the habit of reading and knowledge

seeking

with

creative and up-to-date learning environment. -To promote the habit of reading, pursuit of knowledge and lifelong learning among children and youth. -To provide youth and the general public with the opportunities to develop, exchange and display their creative works, as well as to create varied innovations, products or works that combine the knowledge of art and culture, social values, and technological know-how. |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR THREE }

Readers and Riders: books on the move. VARIS NIWATSAKUL

suggests

that

the

new

library

The pursuit of the new definition for

should make an impact beyond its

Knowledge Recourse Center begins

defining site boundary by reaching

with the critique of the conventional

out to a wider group of users both

idea of what the “library” should be,

demographically and geographically.

which is very static, standing firmly

In order to execute these design

in one place, having strict limitations

criteria,

on shelf space and waiting for its

utilize the existing transportation

activation by its users all around the

infrastructure of the BTS that

city. This notion of the static library

runs past the front of the site, as a

is out-dated and cannot respond

knowledge distributor and also as a

to our era which is dominanted by

user collector since the demographic

information technology in which

of the typical BTS riders is well

information is crucial and is always

mixed between various age groups,

in flux. In this sense, our new library

careers, and incomes. In other

should somehow act like an agent/

words, everyone is using the BTS,

machine similar to social media,

therefore it’s a good way to reach

such as Facebook, or more precisely

these users. One of the advantages

e-Bay, in which its information and

of connecting the building with the

its relevance always re-constitute

BTS is that people could use their

themselves in response to people and

in-between time which is the time

society at large.

spent on commuting between work

One of the case studies for this

and home for knowledge gathering

project is eBay because it has a lot

- reading books that are provided by

of advantages over the conventional

the building through a special crane-

static/physical library in several ways

like machine which injects all kinds

that I think is powerful and that our

of media into the BTS so that people

new notion of a library should look

can rent and read books on the go.

up to while embracing its strategies.

In this context, the building acts as

Many of the interesting advantages

a hub or ”mothership-like” structure

of eBay over the conventional

which stores all kinds of media.

physical library is that its virtual.

With the connection made to the

to its aligned location the second

be transferred to the BTS.

book readers. It is also reaching out

Therefore, the physical space needed

BTS, the special façade of pixelated

part which is located in front of the

The project is not only reaching out

to its surrounding environment

to store physical collections are

pods are essentially book containers

building and moves vertically is now

to a greater number of users via this

through its pixelated pods which

tremendously reduced, resulting in

which can plug into or out of the

activated to move up or down to the

crane-like connection to the BTS,

are in constant re-configuration as

less investment money need to find

BTS to transfer the books from the

precise location of the pods along the

but also through the massiveness of

the notion of knowledge that never

physical storage and maintenance

hub (the building) out to the BTS or

front of the pixelated pods façade in

its mega structure, which encourages

settles and whichalways continues to

costs. By being virtual, it also provides

similarly to the whole demographic

order to retrieve the specific pods to

interaction amongst same preference

make itself obsolete.

the users with a lot of customization

of BTS users and as well, non BTS

and

the

proposal

aims

information,

users, since the infrastructures are

delivered just for each user, based

located all over Bangkok. The nearest

on their past experience with the

household to the BTS station can

site. The efficiency and the idea of

come and pick up the book from

customization and personalization

a special vending machine that

is important for the physical library

contains books, as well.

to stay relevant and effective, in

This connection with the BTS

order to survive in the information

requires the library to develop a

age in which information is always in

special structure that can transfer

flux.

the pods in and out of the building

As such, the new definition of library

to the BTS and vice versa. The

becomes more flexible in changing its

structure that does the trick is a

information and services, according

crane like structure that is powered

to the real time usage of the users

automatically and consists of two

just like eBay. Now, we are looking

parts. The first part is located on top

beyond the strict boundary of the

of the building, moves horizontally

site in which a conventional library

across the roof, and is programed

is lacking in its responce to a larger

automatically to move to the precise

context, by only being relevant to

location that aligns to the axes in

just frequent users or specific user

which the specific pods below are to

groups around the site or just a few

be retrieved. Hence, when the first

kilometers away. The new definition

part of the crane structures is locked

personalized

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

DONE BY

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR THREE }

Environmental Technology and Integrated Building Systems

Sketchbooks Dr. SCOTT DRAKE, ANTOINE LASSUS, In the Spring Semester this year,

PANNASAN SOMBUNTHAM, and KERSTIN SCHLENKER. how the building was constructed,

3rd year students at INDA put their

and how the details were designed to

knowledge of building construction

cope with water, sunlight, and other

to the test with a series of site visits

aspects of the environment.

to key buildings around Bangkok.

The first site we visited was the

Having

about

various

new Zen façade at Central world;

systems

during

an 18metre tall glass curtain wall

the first semester, including air-

with black steel transoms hung from

conditioning, lifts, and fire safety

above using stainless steel rods. On

systems, students were then able to

the outside, I-section steel plates in

focus on façades as an integrated part

a diagonal tree-pattern provide wind

of the environmental performance

bracing. By luck we met the engineer

of the building.

Because each

on site; he told us about the decision

new building is different, and

to cantilever the whole façade,

because construction and material

including the wind bracing, so as

learnt

environmental

technologies change rapidly, the best way to learn about building construction is on site. The process is simple: using a sketchbook, start by drawing the façade approximately to scale. Using the façade drawing, generate a section of the overall

not to interrupt the carpark below ground. To look at heritage details we visited the Na Phra Lan shophouses near Wat Phra Kaew.

Following

a presentation by Dr Yongtanit Pimonsathean and with assistance from Khun Kamphon Ekabandhu from the Crown Property Bureau,

“[...] using a measuring tape, a good eye, and a little bit of guess work, it is possible to work out how the building was constructed.”

students were able to see inside the

façade. From the section, work out

balustrades, clearance for head-

the key details, especially roof/wall

height, slopes for ramps, and so on?

and wall/floor connections. Then

From the sketches printed here,

enter the building, and look closely

you can see that the students made

at each detail – using a measuring

great progress, quickly developing an

tape, a good eye, and a little bit of

architect’s eye and hand to show on

guess work, it is possible to work out

paper how buildings are put together.

award winning conservation work of these beautiful buildings. Another visit was to the Jim Thompson House and the nearby Henry B Thompson Building, home of the William Warren Library.

Both of these

buildings provided good examples of tropical architecture, traditional and contemporary. Other visits included the Chulapat Building and the Chula Museum on our own campus, and a final visit to the wonderful Scala Theatre in Siam Square. For all of the visits, the focus was on design – for a building to look a particular way, how could it be pieced together using concrete, steel, glass, or timber? How could it be detailed to keep out rain and sun, but let in light and air? How could it be made safe for users, with appropriate dimensions

for

handrails

and

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR THREE }

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR FOUR }

DONE BY

4 YEAR

Elective design studios: community

areas of emphasis/ concentrations:

student

and

building

Urban Design, Building Technology,

comprehensive body of research and

technology, history and theory of

History and Theory of Architectural

submitted the research paper as a

architectural design, and real estate

Design,

Estate

part of the semester’s evaluation.

development;

for

Development offered. In addition

This research and analysis phase

visiting master designers, scholars,

to the 4 distinct concentrations,

may be carried out individually

professional practitioners to present

each

or as a group. As a result of the

various design topics and programs;

encouraged to establish a specific

research

opportunity for students to select

topic of investigation. The topic of

each student narrowed down the

their area of emphasis.

investigation was then used as the

topics of interests and individually

ARCH Design V is the last design

‘umbrella’ topic in which the design

identified the main issue(s) that he/

course for INDA students offered in

projects/exercises were developed

she wanted to tackle/prove through

Year 4. It is one of the 8 compulsory

by each instructor. Students in each

architectural

core courses in which INDA students

group were to follow the instructor’s

identified the issue, each student

are required to take in order to

set of exercises and to work on the

was to formulate a clear and specific

fulfi ll the credit requirement for

site(s) and program(s) chosen by the

intention (or thesis statement) for

graduation. Prior to ARCH Design

instructor.

the architectural design. Along the

V, Year 4 students are required to

In comparison to ARCH Design IV,

design process, studio instructors

take ARCH Design IV or option

ARCH Design V allowed students to

frequently referred the students back

design studio in which students are

develop more personal/distinctive

to the individual thesis statement in

allowed to select the design studio

approaches to the topic. Within the

order to assure the clarity of the final

that they preferred. There are 4

scope of the ‘umbrella’ topic, each

design product.

urban

design,

opportunity

and

studio

Real

instructor

was

conducted

and

thorough/

analysis

design.

phase,

Having

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR FOUR }

CURED BREAKING FACES OF CONCRETE Nithidon Kangsanan Concrete has long been used for the foundations of structures of all kinds. It has been employed for many purposes from the walls of ordinary houses to more massive structures,

skyscrapers.

modern times, concrete is not only used for structural purposes but frequently used in a more dynamic way. Concrete has been adapted to use ornamentally and has been applied in several uses such as; building facades, stairs, furniture or even small scale products for decoration. The innovative use of concrete has grown rapidly in both form and technique,making people more creative in thedevelopment of concrete technology. Goal of the project: Using the research and experimentations in finding the design opportunities from everyday normal material by pushing the limit of the material as well as challenge the existing form, technique and appearance. The design processes are based on research and experimenting with the material to see the behavior of the material in different conditions. The research and experimentations involve working with 3 stages of concrete

curing;

before

curing,

during curing and after curing in order to challenge the existing technique and form at different stages of concrete production. Before Curing - Concrete mix with herbs and other elements - Study the mix of concrete1. Before Curing - Structure and strength During Curing - Molding and casting concrete - Texture study and natural pattern of concrete - 3 dimensional shape and form After Curing - Invite 2nd and 3rd elements into the process of curing - Curing after curing of the material +

Imitating existing concrete

innovative translucent

techniques concrete,

such

printed

concrete |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR FOUR }

DONE BY

SACRED CRITIQUE OF THE SACRED AND PEOPLE BELIEF PARAWEE WACHIRABUNTUL Buddhism

fundamentally

practice-based religion. However, people misunderstand it as there are many influential factors such as, culture and other religions that distort the fundamental teachings of Buddhism. For example, around 2010 there was the phenomenon of “ Jatu Kam rama thep”. It is a sacred amulet that people wanted to own. There are many Buddhist practitioners such as monks involved in the ritual. However, the trendiness of the belief eventually distorted and gradually changed into an aspect of marketing, which finally lead to this particular amulet declining in popularity. Meanwhile, recently there has been a similar phenomenon. People were queuing up to own this object; the “iPhone” Initially, it was a functional device that can serve peoples’ needs and provide convenience. However, people have now assigned a status to this functional device, so that it can indicate the users’ taste and social status. These are twophenomena, which showcase how, collectively, people can

assign

spiritual

values

autonomous “objects” in order to provide the sense of protection, fortune, utility and exclusivity. The project is designed to critique the behavior and trends in peoples’ belief. From the above scenarios it shows that people can assign belief to or objectify any object. So I reuse the container, interpreted as a “dumb box” without any particular meaning. The proposal is designed to make people believe in and assign sacredness

these

containers.

Containers are integrated into the “belief practice” to help communicate with users. As it might be difficult to cultivate a new belief system in the society, the project is divided into phases. The project is aimed at urban people and places. These containers can be adapted or modified according to different sites, and presented with three condition of the site; stacking, open square, and installed to existing structure. |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ 11-12 INDA YEAR FOUR }

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

ARTICLES { SPECULATIVE MEGASTRUCTURES } Speculative

WETROPOLIS: Imagining MEGA Structures a Post - Diluvian Future. With this number of INDA news we introduce a new section: Articles, where different projects and papers from students, staff or guests will be presented in parallel to each other and around a chosen topic. The aim is to establish links with works developed in different international schools around the globe and find common interests, languages or even styles. We open the section with the topic Speculative Mega-Structures, including several projects that share not only their considerable magnitude but also a managerial attitude towards architecture, which, in the given cases, could be called infrastructure. As INDA faculty writers we have Taylor Lowe, who presents his vision for a flooded Bangkok understanding it as an opportunity to take on board and not as a problem to flush away; and Fredrik Hellberg, sharing with us his XXL identity port, a blank canvas open to the imagination. Form our invited guests, Michael Kloihofer’s Crawling City dialogues with Wetropolis (T.Lowe) by posing a fictional future London in which general crisis is faced with a radical urban proposal in which nothing ever remains still. Tijn Van de Wijdeven’s Prison project is presented in parallel to Fredrik’s, as another megalomanic processor of experiences. Both Kloihofer and Van de Wijdeven developed this research projects whilst studying at the Architectural Association in London, 2010. Finally, Teodora Vardouli unveils the overlapping of freedom and sublimity, individuality and systematisation, through the Whole Earth Catalogue, in her words, “discusses the programmatic, representational and discursive attributes of the structural and architectonic model of the Space Structure, which underpin its pervasive presence both in the countercultural visions of an “architecture-by-yourself,” and the 1960s techno-speculative urban utopias of participation and democracy” Enjoy! |

While most of the world follows the standard from dust to dust, ashes to ashes cycle, Bangkok prefers something wetter: from water to water. Almost 300 years after rising from the marshy banks of the Chao Phraya, it appears Bangkok will return to its watery origins. A recent UN study estimates that much of the metropolitan area will need to be abandoned by the middle of the century. Bangkok’s population is growing by approximately 100,000 residents per year, just as the city itself is shrinking below sea level 4“ per year. While most cities in this position could simply increase urban density by building up, this would only hasten Bangkok’s subterranean slide. It is the blinding growth of Bangkok’s built environment combined with the over-exhausted aquifers 2 m below the city surface that is causing the city’s physical depression. We are left then with a Post-Diluvian dilemma currently facing many

“the safest place to create new architecture is above water.” world cities: do we sink or swim, flee or float? With the city sinking 10 cm below a sea level that is rising by 40 cm annually, the safest place to create new architecture is above water. As it happens, Bangkok is surrounded by fields of water; brackish, polluted water remaining from an oversaturated shrimp farming industry whose very growth precipitated its own demise. Erstwhile shrimp farmers, who can no longer sustain shrimp life in their polluted plots, are currently selling their water-fields to developers who bury the water in housing tracts, or to the government, who hopes to restore the once thriving mangrove ecosystem. While the government’s aspirations would yield considerable environmental benefits to the metropolis, they cannot compete with the prices developers would pay for the equivalent water field. Developers, though paying the shrimp farmers slightly more, constitute an entirely negative environmental force by encouraging urban spread and commuting, by stifl ing the possibility for open space, and by simply burying brown-field environments with expensive floodsusceptible, cold weather foreign architecture. Each party is thus engaged in a win-lose proposition: suburbs will impair government mangroves, water will submerge suburbs, and shrimp farmers will lose their livelihood. City dwellers, developers, shrimp farmers and the environment all lose more than they gain. This negative economy of loss occurs because Bangkok is still laboring under a very ante-diluvian mindset where flooding is considered a crisis and not a constant. Bangkok has always been flooded and the latest apocalyptic predictions only

suggest that flooding will return with increased consistency. Once the city is submarine, can we even call this phenomenon flooding? Flooding implies a passing phase rather than a fi xed environment, and yet, at the current juncture, water is much more predictable than land. In order to initiate a PostDiluvian perspective that designs for water we must abandon the Metropolis in favor of the Wetropolis, and Architecture in favor of Aquatecture. Wetropolis: Imagining a Post Diluvian Future proposes a Post-Diluvian prototype community that transforms principles from Thailand’s centuries old traditions of flood-conscious aquatecture into a contemporary, sustainable and visually stunning Wetropolis. We, S+PBA, examined the entirely supra-marine stilt home community of Koh Pan Yii that hovers above the Andaman sea in Southern Thailand, successfully sustaining all of the typical functions of an urban community—schools, public spaces, hospitals, utilities, industry. However, unlike Koh Pan Yii, we provided a design solution that minimizes its foot print on the water, thereby enabling the continued cultivation of mangrove forests that will supply the community with carbon dioxide mitigating flora, with a natural effluent fi ltration system, with some of the only green open space in Bangkok and with moderate local shrimp farming. Our goal is not to replace the Metropolis with the Wetropolis, but to exceed it. We designed a community prototype elevated above the acres of underutilized shrimp farms that aligns the interests of shrimp farmers, urbanites, developers and the government by simultaneously sustaining mangrove restoration, modest shrimp farming, and a growing population in a sinking city that can thrive unaffected by the impending floods. Blessing or Curse? Flooding, according to our community vision, will constitute a cathartic ablution, not a cataclysmic obliteration, of Bangkok. Water, detoxifying water, will wash away the 20th century’s misguided substitutions of aircon for context, roads for canals, indoors for outdoors, anesthetic environments for aesthetic environments. Currently, Wetropolis is one of the 20 finalist for the Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment. A jury that includes Sejima Kazuyo, Winy Maas, and Kunle Adeyemi will decide the winner any day now

BY: TAYLOR LOWE ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY Massachusetts

Institute

Technology,

Department of Architecture, 77 Massachusetts Av., Cambridge,

E-mail:

Massachusetts,

02139-4307,

USA.

-@-.-

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ SPECULATIVE MEGASTRUCTURES } ARTICLES

CRAWLING The year is 2045 and the city of London is in a state of crisis; the two fold rise in population and fuel costs threaten the city’s ability to sustain food production and supply to the city centre from the agricultural lands that surround it, lands that are pushed ever further from the cities core by rampant outward expansion of the suburban city. The threat of over-farming these lands is imminent. In addition the city is plagued by increasingly destructive floods brought on by climate change. With this two fold crisis, the future of the metropolitan model of london is put into question. Amidst this crisis, the government, spurred on by a public demand for action, launches a competition, a call for ideas, to re-imagine the city of london and its future as a surviving city. Among the various proposals for mega density and urban farming, one proposal submitted by an unheard-of practice put forward a radical proposal which, instead of finding a way to bring resources into the city, proposed to bring the city to the resources. A crawling city. By re-organising the patterns of expansion and destruction within the city along a linear trajectory, the architects proposed a new type of city, a city composed of one mile

“One day, they hoped, it would grow back, and God would forgive them.” by one mile quadrants organised along a line, beginning at the outer boundary of the city and expanding linearly in the direction of the agricultural lands. All new development would be constricted to this square mile and built at the front of the line. This new type of linear city being only one mile wide, would sustain agriculture directly adjacent to all parts of the city at all times. After 100 years, the oldest part of the city at the back end would be dismantled and recycled into the new forms of the city at the front, thus creating a new element to the concept of urbanity. Propulsion. The city would crawl forward at one mile per year, toward a bright green future of resources. One end in perpetual consumption (ever consuming), the other in perpetual disintegration. The competition - designed as a commentary of the market driven society and its disregard for the |

importance of history- becomes a reality. The crawling linear city becomes adopted because of its immediate development potential and how it can transform outskirt land into prime real estate. Fate is not without its sense of irony. Soon the rythym of perpetual expansion began to become immersed in the cultural calendar. The opening of the new event merged easily into the celebration of easter, it became a frenzy of real-estate free for all not seen since the days of the great Oklama rush. All the newest architectural styles would be on display here, a new utopian vision of the city - enough to sustain the interest for at least a year.

CITY:

A retroactive hypothesis of quasi ctional future London.

But the greatness of the new city was not without its victims. The city began to naturally reorganise itself creating hierarchies in shifting land values, potential for the wealthy to invest and become richer - those that were too poor lived in the back, and were forced to move every year. Soon protests began to emerge - and a battle ensued for the collective memory and history of the city to be preserved. Older generations would fight to protect their childhood districts from distruction, These battles always fell on deaf ears, some sympathized, but every one knew the struggle was pointless, the city had to keep moving, new lands were the only way to sustain the population. It was echoed in the cities mantra “we must move on” - which was printed on billboards all across the city. Every so often - people refused to leave their homes that were destined for dismantling and choose to stay behind., At first those who remain, are close enough to the living city to still survive but as years go by the city moves out of reach. Those left behind are usually old, and do not survive for long. In its wake it would leave a snail trail of destruction - a barren nutrientless desert. One day, they hoped, it would grow back, and God would forgive them. The city continued on occupying many landscapes, though no one lifetime was long enough to experience a major difference

BY: MICHAEL KLOIHOFER AA DIPLOMA, RIBA PART II. 4th

year

Bedford

Thesis

Square,

the

Architectural

WC1B3ES

Association,

LONDON

UK.

With tutors: Monia de Marchi and Natasha Sandmeier.

E-mail:

-@-.-

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

ARTICLES { SPECULATIVE MEGASTRUCTURES } Don’t drop the SOAP!! THE PRISON: Incarceration|Rehabilitation Where walls divide inside from outside, the threshold introduces an element of contact. This project explores

architecture

through

definitions of territoriality and control. The prison is an integral response of

mutual

process

and

social

incarceration

rehabilitation. Considering effective imprisonment as a primary force to

reintegrate

criminals

within

society, the traditional prison with cells has lost its credibility as an effective tool for juridical policy. As such, architecture should facilitate a process in which the threshold gradually lifts boundaries between the punitive factors of incarceration towards a final state of rehabilitation.

“More than a conventional spatial typology, the prison is constructed as a managerial entity (...)” More than a conventional spatial typology, the prison is constructed as a managerial entity in which both elements coexist. Parallel to each other, two organisations of incarceration

and

rehabilitation

follow a physical and mental series of stages in which thresholds are vertical and horizontal moments of transition. Each transition will abandon the state of isolation towards the collective realm. The most fundamental human conditions are taken as a rule to determine 6 subsequent stages of reintegration. The

process

cognitive-,

communicative-, creative-, spiritual-, sportive- and hygienic improvement is the fundamental thread through which criminals become citizens again

BY: TIJN VAN DE WIJDEVEN AA DIPLOMA, RIBA PART II. 4th

year

Bedford

Thesis

Square,

the

Architectural

WC1B3ES

Association,

LONDON

UK.

With tutors: Monia de Marchi and Natasha Sandmeier.

E-mail: tijnvandewijdeven@gmail.com |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ SPECULATIVE MEGASTRUCTURES } ARTICLES

Freak Out! THE SECOND COMMUNITY: Identity Tourism. California City. In the desert northeast of Los Angeles in an abandoned city called California City the 739600m2 Second Community floats above the desert floor like a mountain avatar. In its crater the 1500 heliostatic mirrors reflect the light onto the artificial sky covering the desert of the trans-identity port. With a capacity of 40,000 people the port gathers in its featureless white space individuals open to role-play.

“Totally! And I was like, this thing is full on ugly. Like a bridge on acid with all that metal and stuﬀ. And oh my God, its freaking huge and it was so strange, cuz there were like no walls or doors and everything was like totally white. There were like thousands of people totally doing weird cool stuﬀ. You should totally come, its freakin gnarly!” The Second Community explores an alternative identity tourism that goes beyond the virtual space of online role-playing games, the open desert of the Burning Man festival and the convention halls of Cosplayers. Spanning half a kilometer the artificial desert of the port isolates the person in a void of imagination where the persona of an individual becomes a fugitive and creative semiotic gadget which collectively generate a public space of radical self exploration an experimentation. The porous mountain avatar surrounding and supporting the sky of the port collects its energy from the concentrated solar power plant in the center of the crater, harvesting the power of the sun and delivers it to the caves around the centered port where the identity tourists prepare for the events in the port

BY: C. FREDRIK V. HELLBERG AA DIPLOMA, RIBA PART II. 5th

year

Bedford

Thesis

Square,

the

Architectural

WC1B3ES

Association,

LONDON

UK.

With tutors: Cristina Diaz Moreno and Efren Garcia Grinda.

E-mail: fredrik@thecfvh.com |

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ SPECULATIVE MEGASTRUCTURES }

“Load-sharing Intelligently:” Crystalline Fantasies of Architectural Democracy. PROLOGUE What do the late 1960s DIY architectures of the american hippie anchoritism and the megastructural fantasies of the european architectural radicalism have in common? This text discusses the programmatic, representational and discursive attributes of the structural and architectonic model of the Space Structure, which underpin its pervasive presence both in the countercultural visions of an “architecture-by-yourself,” and the 1960s techno-speculative urban utopias of participation and democracy. This commentary is based on an analysis of the crystallographic fascination traced in the listings of the “Shelter and Land Use” section of the first five issues of the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1971), in conjunction with its European counterpart in works such as this of Yona Friedman and Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz. In this discussion the structural and the crystalline are viewed as metaphors for hybrid techno-social and technoecological constructs, which vested technocratic concepts such as systematization, infrastructure, modularization and combinatorics with democratizing and humanizing connotations. Understanding the ambivalent nature of these early speculations can promote the historical contextualization and criticism of a persistent technoutopianism, which underlies current -digitally enhanced- architectural explorations.

THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG 19681971: WHOLE SYSTEMS, DEMOCRATIC TECHNICS AND DESIGN “We are as gods and might as well get good at it [...]” was the statement of purpose, which initiated all the issues of the WholeEarth Catalog (WEC), first published in the Fall of 1968 by Stewart Brand, a Stanfordschooled biologist, soon to become an emblematic countercultural icon. Under the programmatic agendaof “Access to Tools,” stated in the Catalog’s subtitle, the WEC formed a unique informational device,structured on a model of juxtaposition between seemingly disparate elements which spanned the entirerange of human activity. Weaved in a horizontal net, the Catalog allowed for infinite combinatorialpossibilities of its content. The juxtapositions of high and low tech, cybernetics and mystic religion,ecology and DIY within the same system of information, created a space for the cross-breeding ofconcepts seemingly stemming from different worlds. All these bits and pieces of information, besides theirvast diversity, coproduced and popularized the techno-social vision of small scale technologies,individualism and community as world-changing forces. By the Fall of 1969 the Catalog had reached 60.000 readers. In 1971, when Brand released the LastWEC, the number of readers had reached hundreds of thousands. The Catalog was a phenomenonwhich extended far beyond the limits of the back to the land communities, to the entire American society,creating a collective imaginary of user empowerment through access to tools and information. “We don’t have to put it together, it is together” was the underlying hypothesis which enabled theCatalog’s otherwise strange assemblage of content. Brand, having been exposed in the techno-mystical,psychedelic explorations of USCO and the “trips” of the Merry Pranksters, was already immersed in a culture which was drawing inspiration from cybernetics to fantasize on ways

SHELTER AND LAND USE: THE TECHNOECOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE OF THE SPACE STRUCTURE The Fall 1968 publication of the WEC “Contents” page included seven sections, which became the spine of following issues. The “Shelter and Land Use” section was the second thematic, amongst “Understanding Whole Systems”, “Industry and Craft”, “Communications”, “Community”, “Nomadics” and “Learning”. It was edited by Lloyd Kahn, also schooled in Stanford, with a minor editing experience which he acquired while working in the United States Air Force newspaper in Germany, as well as a small experience in building, starting as a carpenter after he quit his broker insurance job in California in the 1960s and undertaking increasingly ambitious projects. In 1968 Kahn had started building geodesic domes, under the influence of Buckminster Fuller, who was at the time getting established as a countercultural idol. From 1968 to 1971 the “Shelter and Land Use” of the Catalog consistently opened with a reference to Fuller’s work on Geodesics. The books suggested by the section’s editor, Lloyd Kahn, are usually about Fuller’s work and are being suggested as beginner’s guides for those interested in “picking up on specific projects of his, such as domes, geometry, cars, demographic maps and charts etc”1 The works of the “master” are already spoken by others, modified, appropriated, “democratized”; either advancing his theory by building upon its basic principles, or inventing innovative, intuitive implementations of his patents and designs. At the time that Kahn was starting his experimentations with Geodesic Domes, Steve Baer, another important actor of the american |

counterculture, had already produced his Dome Cookbook , an extensive documentation of the dome experimentations in the renown New Communalist settlement of the “Drop City” in Trinidad, Colorado. The Dome Cookbook was first published in

of understanding and exposing the underlying structures of world systems. Wiener, Fuller and McLuhan, carrying technohumanistic visions which were developed in the collaborative, cross-disciplinary environments of which were -paradoxically- emerging within the US cold war labs [Turner, 2006], were central influences in the counterculture movement. Brand was particularly inspired by Fuller and his discussion of the design of technologies based on the recognition of the universal patterns of nature. Fuller’s idea of a “comprehensive designer” as understanding the universal patterns in nature and using this understanding to harvest the potential of technology became a constitutive idea for all the WEC publications. The “tools” to which the Catalog granted access, did not resort to utilitarian objects but aimed to educate users in first understanding the world and then deploying soft technologies to change it for the betterment of humanity. The Catalog was not only advocating for systems but was a system itself, a live experiment in producing a self-sustaining space bringing together different worlds in an esoterically, almost mystically, interlinked network. The content of the WEC and the sources of its contributors in the basic editions from 1968-1971 indicate an amalgam of institutional, industrial and governmental technologies, New York and San Francisco artists, the Bay area psychedelic community and the new communalist and back to the land movement. These diverse parties co-produced a techno-centric vision of social change where the alteration of consciousness and the deployment of democratic, small scale, soft technologies, become pathways of resistance against the hierarchies of the post-war militarized, centralized and bureaucratic system. But what is the Architectural expression of these emerging techno-humanistic visions? 1968 and exhibited Baer’s obsession with geometry. For him Fuller’s designs became a liberating weapon. In the synergetic geometries of the dome, where elements work collaboratively “load sharing intelligently”2 and conquer space. Baer saw in this new system the promise of a liberation from traditional hierarchical structural articulations; no more pillars. A new system that will allow architects to break free from the cube and launch themselves in threedimensional space. In the intelligently-load-sharing structures of the dome, lies the metaphor of a new society; “one that will someday reveal the the load bearing pillars of today’s arrangement as totally unnecessary”3. Parallel to the thematic of the domes, in the 1968-1971 editions of the WEC there was consistently an entry on Space Structures, describing structural systems which allowed for the spanning of very long distances by minimally touching the Earth. The first Catalog included R. M. Davis’ book entitled Space Structures which offered a comprehensive account of systems presented in the 1966 London Conference on Space Structures, which was dominated by the figures of Buckminster Fuller and the French mathematician Le Ricolais, renowned for the study of organic structures and the development of resilient structural systems based on the analysis of their properties. The dome-works and the space structure entries reveal a fascination with the crystalline which persists in the 1968-1971 period of the Catalog . Apart from the rather obvious observation that the crystalline was legitimated as a potential architectural language for the counterculture through its affinity with the logic of geodesics, there seem to also be other factors which render it an apt spatial metaphor for the new world that the counterculturalists envisioned.

INDA Newsletter N4 August 2012.

{ SPECULATIVE MEGASTRUCTURES } MEGASTRUCTURAL COUNTERPARTS

The assertion of the Space Structure was the Architecture of technoutopia, already carried the precedence of the 1960s radical socio-technical visions which had been developed at the other side of the Atlantic. The Catalog never explicitly mentioned any of the proposals of prospective French groups such as the GIAP4 or the GEAM5 , founded by Yona Friedman, which had a significant influence in the dissemination of the megastructural topologies in Japan and in England. However, the mutual obsession with crystalline space structures as symbols of a new synergy between the technological, the social and the ecological cannot go unnoticed. In their European megastructural counterparts, the crystalline space structures were deployed with an affine objective as in the case of the New Communalists: to “look at the laws of space” 6 and to produce systems which capitalized on the advancement of engineering and prefabrication technologies in order to develop new techno(eco)logical environments. To borrow Abraham Moles term, these environments would constitute man’s new “Umwelt”7 . The “structural, systematized, prefabricated, assemble-able and disassemble-able, growing and contracting labyrinth in Space” [Fielitz, 1962] was the emblem of an architecture which surpassed the antagonistic relationship between the natural and the artificial, the urban and the rural and allowed for the development of a climatized “garden of Eden” [Rouillard, 2004], where technology and nature coexisted synergistically. One of perhaps the most indicative examples of these visions are the participatory techno-utopias of the Hungarian-born Architect Yona Friedman. Since 1959 and the Mobile Architecture manifesto, Friedman was rejecting the architects’ opportunistic “pseudo-theories” and was advocating for a general architectural theory which would “underpin all personal hypotheses” [Friedman, 1959]. He was envisioning non-defining systematized spatial infrastructures; plateaus in constant flux levitated above a re-natured earth. These infrastructures also became the locus of Friedman’s political Realizable Utopias8 which would promote individualism, communication and common understanding of the resources of the “Spaceship Earth” 9 .

THREE METAPHORS: DESIGNING THE STRUCTURE OF SPACE, MINIMALLY GROUNDED, PLATEAUS OF DEMOCRACY

First, Space structures, megastructures, were potentially infinite, acquiring cosmic dimensions. Space Structures could, hypothetically, cover the Whole Earth. In that sense they can be viewed as Whole Earth systems. After revealing the “laws of space,” they follow the modernist industrial ideal of standardization and repetition of the element that Konrad Wachsmann was envisioning in the 1940s10 , to produce a cosmic non-object [Burnam, 1968], comparable to the dimensions of the Earth, coexisting with it in perfect harmony. The WEC fetischized structure and order in the natural and artificial world. The discovery of underlying patterns and the deciphering of the complex orders of matter and life, offered a new opportunity for action for the “Comprehensive Designer” to produce new techno-natural synergies. As the experimental mathematician Keith Critchlow cited in the Spring 1970 Catalog listing of his book Order in Space11 , was denoting: “Understanding the structure of a system lets you design it. [...] This book is designed for the visually oriented, it is a manual of functions [...] Mechanisms. architecture, apply science and all technologies imply designers. These designers need to know the basic “freedoms” of their constructions, space.” The crystallographic fascination of the WEC did not resort to the scale of the long span space frames or the fulleresque domes but is also traced in a microscopic level. The organic crystalline structure of the plastic molecules, was enough to invite Lloyd Kahn’s optimism on the potential of this new material: “the chemist is a designer of structure.” 12 Second, Space structures were light, continuous and ephemeral. Space Structures could grow and shrink with little effort and they could completely disappear or move without leaving any traces on the Earth. The imaginary of a light architecture with minimum imprints, levitated over a ground which has been reconquered by the natural would become a persistent techno(eco) logical vision in the late 1960s. It was this ingenious lightness that made the user “laugh and giggle”13 in front of Frei Otto’s lightweight structures in the Expo 67 West Germany pavilion, which according to Kahn was “The only pavilion [...] more beautiful than Fuller’s US Dome”.14 The same transparent and ephemeral, almost immaterial, presence was exhibited by the new plastic pre-fab homes. The Futuro dwelling15, for example, was presented as a light weight home that “can be helicopter dropped and require no site preparation” EPILOGUE

and whose “interior furnishings are optional and look plastic and shiny, in the direction of future houses”. Along the same lines of an architecture with no imprint, the WEC featured inflatables and pneumatic structures, which soon became central to the counterculture movement. The experimentations of the nomadic collective of Ant Farm, produced the Inflatocookbook (1971) featured in the Last WEC publication, an inflatables analogue of Baer’s Dome Cookbook for inflatables and pneumatic structures. The book was featured in the Last publication of the WEC16. This resonated with the climatized labyrinths of the megastructural utopias, endless interiors which produced new gardens of Eden, providing climatic comfort and protection in a seamless, light and transparent architectural continuum. Third, the Space Structure proposed a new model of inhabitation which allowed for constant mobility within a techno-natural environment. The Space Structure was an inhabitable system, a featureless generic Architecture, which demolished spatial boundaries and became an endless and fluid interior, allowing for personal mobility, social and political self planning. The idea of a non defining infrastructure as a techno-social vision was extensively articulated in the “radical” architectural french scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The way that American megastructural utopias were discussed in the Catalog, offers a rich space for analogies with the European radical architecture of the time. It is characteristic that the work of Archigram was mentioned from the first Catalog. Soleri’s Arcology: The City in the Image of Man17, which was listed in the 1970s publication suggested the vision of a city-as-organism which will produce a new kind of subject. According to the reviewer, Ron Williams, “Soleri refers to Teilhard de Chardin in approaching the understanding of man as a cosmic problem by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology and geology. Western man must rise from his technology and one (I think) way is by being aware (of it) but ignoring it at the same time. [...] These drawings are like doorways, they’re of fantastic cities, wholly improbable but obviously, cosmically possible”. Along the same lines Moshe Safdie’s Beyond Habitat18, which was shown in the 1967 Montreal exhibition, exemplifies another megastructural urban system, which produced a model of a high rise village life. In the crystalline, repetitive structures of the domes or space frames, the counterculture saw the potential for an almost immaterial architecture, nomadic, assembled and disassembled according to the constant shifts of the needs and desires of their inhabitants.

FOOTNOTES 1 Whole Earth Catalog (California : Menlo Park, Fall 1968): pp. 13 2 Ibid. The “cacophonous juxtapositions” of 3 Ibid. the Whole Earth Catalog reacted to 4 The Groupe International d’Architecture Prospective (GIAP) was initiated in 1965 by the produce techno-social amalgams. French art and architectural critic Michel Ragon. Members of the GIAP included Yona Friedman, Their chemical composition binds Paul Maymont, Ionel Schein, Nicolas Schoffer, and Victor Vasarely seemingly antithetical concepts 5 The Groupe d’Etudes d’Architecture Mobile (GEAM) was founded by Yona Friedman in 1958 and approaches into unified 6 Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz in an interview with Stephan Strauß, in: Der Baumeister, September 1999, p. 42 yet ambivalent constructions, 7 Cited from Larry Busbea, “Spatial Culture in France, 1960-1970”, in Topologies: The Urban which bridge high technology Utopia in France, 1960-1970 with emancipatory social 8 Th is refers to Yona Friedman’s book entitled Realisable Utopias; Yona Friedman, Utopies visions. The Whole Earth Catalog Realisables, (Paris: L’Eclat, 2000 : fi rst appeared in 1974) publications built a model of 9 In the chapter entitled “The Global City” in Realisable Utopias (ibid. 2)Yona Friedman notes design democratization which “Kenneth Boulding, and after him, Buckminster Fuller) have formulated the expression coupled metaphors of control, “Spaceship Earth”. I have always been impressed by this construct, because it expresses very systematization and technoclearly an idea, maybe otherwise very occidental and puritan: we are abandoned on a space sublimity with metaphors of vessel - whose reserves are limited - and we are responsible for our survival” 10 Wachsmann, Konrad, “Seven theses”, in Programs and Manifestos on 20th Century freedom, individuality and A question then raised at this point Architecture, Conrad Ulrich (ed.) (Cambridge : MIT Press, 1971), pp. 156 democracy, utilizing architectural is which are the conceptual, formal 11 Whole Earth Catalog (California : Menlo Park, Spring 1970): pp. 30 BY: THEODORA VARDOULI and programmatic characteristic representations and metaphors 12 Whole Earth Catalog (California : Menlo Park, Spring 1970): pp. 26 DOCTORATE CANDIDATE IN characteristics of the Megastructure, drawn from techno-speculative, 13 Whole Earth Catalog (California : Menlo Park, Fall 1968): pp. 14 as a crystalline, systematized radical architectures of the same era. DESIGN AND COMPUTATION 14 Ibid. Institute of Technology, spatial labyrinth which resonate These encounters constitute the basal Massachusetts 15 Whole Earth Catalog (California : Menlo Park, Fall 1969): pp. 19 Department of Architecture, 77 Massachusetts Av., with the countercultural aesthetic, discourses of a model of technology16 The Last Whole Earth Catalog (California : Menlo Park, June 1971): pp. 107 Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139-4307, USA. programmatic and environmental mediated user empowerment as 17 Whole Earth Catalog (California : Menlo Park, Fall 1969): pp. 19 18 The Last Whole Earth Catalog (California : Menlo Park, June 1971): pp. 88 simultaneously a social vision E-mail: thvard@mit.edu anxieties. | | Chulalongkorn University | Faculty of Architecture International Program in Design + Architecture Office | Room 409, Architecture Buillding Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 THAILAND |

and a technocratic dream, which persists and is amplified today. The new wave of techno-optimism and Do-it-Yourself culture developed in the realms of cyberspace can be seen as containing this inherent ambivalence, oscillating between authoritarianism and democracy, de-humanization and humanism, control and freedom. Understanding this inherent tension and exposing its multiple layers of metonymies and metaphors, in order to expose its structures of control can lead to a politicization of the current and past utopias of technology-mediated design democratization

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INDA|PUBLICATIONS International Program in Design and Architecture. Chulalongkorn University INDA Office Room 409, Architecture Building Architecture Faculty, Chulalongkorn University Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 THAILAND

04 -INDA Semestrial Newsletter Number 04. August 2012. FREE INDA NEWSLETTER 2011 -2012

INDA launches new identity. “According to the INDA philosophy, the term “Fresh Focus Forward” is a principle of the INDA vision. To manage INDA as an organization, it is time for the INDA logo to be changed in order to reinforce INDA’s brand identity. The previous logo has been employed since INDA was established in 2006, focusing on the connotation of identity colors, black, purple, orange and green. To embrace INDA’s key message with current design trend, a new form has been created based upon INDA characteristics. It is understandable that we are an ever-changing institution. Hence, the proposed logotype underlies a capability of design extension. Further development of typography can be broadened by a geometric platform which entails flexibility and offers strong identity.”

International Program in Design + Architecture Chulalongkorn University

International Program

in Design + Architecture

Chulalongkorn University

Branding Manager at INDA

CHU L AL

INTE ONGKOR N R IN D NATION UNIVERS AL P ESIG I TY N+A R RCH OGRAM I T EC TUR E

“As we understand that INDA is a dynamic and ever-changing institution, the proposed logotype is not intended intended to have a so called dominating “concept” but an underlying geometric logic that can allow for further development of a graphic system, accommodating for the necessary flexibility whilst providing a neutral identity. Created on a square grid the logotype uses typographical abstraction to create an apophenia effect, meaning that even though fundamental pieces of the four letters have been removed, we can still read the word, reducing it to its essence or minimal frame for the individual to complete the rest, therefore always leaving a space for personal interpretation and creativity, as we believe a school of architecture should do. Given to us was a meaning inherent to INDA’s colour scheme, we were told that BLACK represented the international nature of the school, PURPLE signified creativity, ORANGE gave its place to asian culture within the institution and GREEN symbolised design and sustainability. Only one thing was missing, so we increased the magenta towards PINK to add Chula to the equation.”

Chulalongkorn University

International Program in Design + Architecture

CHULALONGKORN UNIVERSITY

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM IN DESIGN + ARCHITECTURE

CHULALONGKORN UNIVERSITY

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM IN DESIGN + ARCHITECTURE

Graphics Team at INDA |