Type: Academic

Location: Bangkok, Thailand

Insructor: Chatpong Chuenrudeemol 

Year: 2026

This Spring 2026 Option Studio at Harvard GSD that investigates the Bangkok shophouse as a form of smart urban infrastructure. Working with DEPA, Thailand’s Digital Economy Promotion Agency, the studio examines how informal economies, mixed-use building typologies, and bottom-up neighborhood systems can support new models of urban intelligence, positioning the shophouse not as obsolete “urban trash,” but as an adaptive framework for architectural, social, and technological transformation. 

My local bastard is the hydraulic lifting of houses in Kerala, India, which became more visible after the 2018 floods. Instead of demolishing flood-prone homes or relocating residents, existing houses are physically raised using hydraulic systems. This allows the building to remain in place while changing its relationship to the ground.

This condition treats the house not as a fixed object, but as something that can be adjusted over time. It reveals a practical form of climate adaptation, where existing structures are modified incrementally to respond to recurring flood risk.

My Bangkok bastard is the sidewalk condition where the ground plane of the city becomes an extension of the shophouse. In Bangkok, sidewalks are often occupied by dining, parking, vending, storage, and other everyday activities. Rather than functioning only as circulation space, the sidewalk becomes a front yard for the shophouse.

This spatial logic also extends inward. The ground floor, rear spaces, and back-of-house areas begin to operate as a continuation of the sidewalk, creating a porous zone that moves through the building.

I also studied the Thai tun, or the underbelly space of traditional Thai houses on stilts. Like the sidewalk spillover, the thai tun is an open, shaded, flexible area that supports many activities without needing fixed walls or permanent programs.

Together, these rural and urban Bangkok conditions suggest a way of thinking about the ground floor as open, shared, and adaptable.

My project brings together the hydraulic lifting logic from Kerala with the open ground-plane logic of Bangkok’s sidewalk and thai tun. The design reimagines the shophouse by removing the walls from the first floor, creating an open underbelly that allows movement, activity, and floodwater to pass through.

Within this open floor plan, I introduce a system of movable platforms that can rise and fall depending on need.

During the dry season, these platforms become flexible floors for dining, markets, gathering, storage, work, or other informal programs. Their different heights create a variety of spatial conditions within the same open framework.

During the rainy season or flood events, the platforms operate as lifting devices, moving people, objects, and goods from the ground level to upper floors. In this way, the project turns the shophouse into a flood-adaptive system. It does not erase informal urban life, but gives it a flexible infrastructure that can respond to both everyday use and future climate risk in Bangkok.