MONDAY | FEB 20 | 4 PM | AB 100
Chatpong “Chat” Chuenrudeemol will share examples of the creative ways Thai people craft architectural solutions to daily problems, resulting in a more useful and playful city. He calls his lecture “Bangkok Bastards,” defining the term as “homegrown architectural concoctions created by everyday people … to solve everyday problems … in everyday life.”
“Bastards” may include a rundown shack in a neighborhood chumchon (slum), a local street vendor cart, a bastardized shophouse, or a make-shift sidewalk bench. Bangkokians walk past these examples every day, but would never consider it as serious design or Architecture.
Chat obtained his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from U.C. Berkeley in 1994 and his Masters of Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 2000. After completing his studies in the US, Chat returned to his birthplace of Bangkok to form CHAT architects, a practice combining research and design, resulting in innovative multi-scalar projects that aim to stimulate community through strategies that re-interpret authentic local conditions. In 2015, he created CHAT lab, a research think tank aimed at discovering new Thai vernacular “street” typologies, affectionately called “Bangkok Bastards.”
Like its human namesake, an architectural bastard has no traceable architectural parents/lineage, no cultural history, no design theory that legitimizes it form, he says. Many view bastards as eyesores to the city, lacking in any serious design pedigree, and unworthy of serious documentation or research. However, he argues that Bangkok bastards are the most authentically inventive examples of architecture in Thailand. They are pure, intuitive, flexible, humorous responses to real problems. Often times, their strategies utilize cheap, salvaged, discarded materials…hacked, re-imagined, and repurposed in entirely new and unexpected ways. They take advantage of existing urban conditions, turn them upside down, to create a new way of living, selling, playing in the capital city of Bangkok.
His talk will include an exploration of how “Bangkok Bastards” can potentially lead to the discovery of “Indiana Crossbreeds.”
This lecture has been approved for AIA credits. Write caplectures@bsu.edu for information.
