Bangkok is Jakarta is Kuala Lumpur is Hanoi is Manila is Singapore…  

Southeast Asian cities are quickly morphing into clones of one another as developer-driven luxury condos, office towers, and mega-malls homogenize their skylines and streets.    

Lost in the march towards “development” is the Bangkok shophouse – the Thai capital’s most longstanding and recognizable building types.  Due to its low-rise nature, abundance, and ubiquity, the shophouse is commonly perceived as outdated “urban trash” as much of it is underused, ageing, or partially vacant. Yet its spatial DNA – narrow frontages, deep floorplates, stacked floors, and active street thresholds – aligns with the operational logics of the often-invisible grass-roots economies that sustain the city. Street food vendors, motorcycle taxi networks, craft workshops, migrant labor, night markets, and micro-logistics occupy these interstitial spaces, generating a dense, layered, and temporal urban fabric often overlooked in formal planning.

The studio invites students to re-imagine Bangkok as a new bottom-up urbanism.  We will look to the shophouse typology as the foundation on which to ‘grow’ a responsive, adaptive, and resilient “Shophouse Metropolis”.  We will explore how aging shophouses might be reimagined as the next-generation live – work infrastructures that serve Bangkok’s “forgotten citizens” — the working class. Through adaptation and hybridization, these buildings can accommodate informal labor, domestic life, micro-production, mobility hubs, and night-time economies within a single vertical structure. Students will examine strategies that integrate low-tech, organic operations with digital and high-tech systems, creating a “bottom-up smart city” that legitimizes and organizes informal practices while enhancing productivity, safety, and social value.  

Drawing on the methodologies of Chat’s ‘Bangkok Bastard’ Research, students will travel to Bangkok and explore city’s ‘live’ street architecture.  In addition to surveying standard and ‘bastardized’ shophouses, we will record Bangkok’s street food networks, local ‘chumchons’ (shanties), and other informal objects, buildings, and conditions.  Through research, mapping, and speculative design, students will generate proposals that reveal and reinforce the socio-economic networks at the heart of Bangkok. The studio positions shophouses not merely as heritage or housing, but as adaptable engines of urban life – buildings capable of transforming the 21st-century city through vertically layered, socially, economically, and technologically resilient urban infrastructures.

Through the re-imagining of the shophouse typology at the urban scale, the studio aims to position Bangkok as the first SMART urban laboratory to champion the concept of the Bottom-up Smart City … one that legitimizes, organizes, and combines digital, high-tech systems with organic, low-tech operations, that have the potential to significantly transform the 21st century ASEAN metropolis.

PREREQUISITES: Students should have on-site recording skills to survey small-small buildings and objects as well as basic 2D drawing and 3D modelling skills.

Chat will be in Cambridge, teaching in-person for 10 weeks out of the 13-week studio duration.   During his 3 weeks away, Chat will work with the students via Zoom.  Chat will also be travelling with the studio to Bangkok in late February.