Bangkok Bastards

In 2000, one of South East Asia's most exciting architects, Chatpong Chuenrudeemol (known in design circles and pretty much everywhere else as "Chat") graduated with a Master's of Architecture from Harvard University. At the time, his classmates invariably were jetting off to illustrious placements in San Francisco, London, New York and Paris, entering the rarified climbs of 'serious' architecture. A world of postmodernist deconstructivism and very expensive giant glass cubes. But Chat wasn't interested in any of that. Degree in hand, he booked a one-way ticket to the last place anybody would expect: Bangkok, Thailand.

"I just thought Bangkok was the place to be," he laughs. "Even though, at the time, it really wasn't. There's an energy in Bangkok, and in South East Asia in general, that is unlike anywhere else. It's like the prototype for developing countries."

In some ways, it wasn't such a surprising move. Chat was born in Bangkok in 1972. The family moved to America when he was six, and Chat spent most of his formative years in the US, bouncing back and forth across the globe to visit family.

"A lot of people expected me to be completely Americanised. And I am, in certain ways. But I've always felt a deep link back to Thailand, because we'd always come home during the summers. I never forgot how to speak the language."

The Thai language was one thing, but the young Chat quickly realised that he had no idea how to speak the language of South East Asian design. His Western architectural education, which was about as eminent and expensive as you can find on planet Earth, had also saddled him with some unconscious biases. "Let's start with bad architecture, because that's what I was doing," he laughs. "I didn't know what was good. My whole foundational knowledge of architecture had to be re-learned."

Example? Well, in Western architectural circles in the late 90s, there was a serious aversion to pitched or gabled roofs. Cubes were considered cool. Students like Chat were taught to view buildings as a mass, which a skilled architect would then "carve" into. Like a sculptor. The result tended to be very artful, deconstructed boxes with lots of glass and lots of windows. None of which worked in monsoonal Thailand.

"You can solve so many tropical problems with a good roof and a large overhang," Chat says. "If you build a box without a roof, you're inclined to make it beautiful as an object, which means glass. And that causes more problems, because now you need ventilation, but all of the sun and rain comes in, so you rely on technology, which never works. It's a domino effect."

Then Chat had a lightbulb moment. Instead of trying to cram Western architectural ideals onto Bangkok, he flipped the script: what if he could reverse engineer a new form of architecture from Bangkok itself. From the streets. The hawkers and long-tail boats. The people. The slums and stray dogs and choking pollution. From the seedy Love Motels. What if he could take the city – exactly as it was – and somehow harness that incredible energy? That hyper-local inventive power?

It was a philosophy that would eventually form the basis of Chat's own firm, CHAT Architects, as well as a revolutionary new project. Something Chat named 'Bangkok Bastards'.

It's probably helpful to think of Bangkok Bastards as a free online repository for interesting design ideas. Chat refers to it as his "encyclopaedia". It's a place to collect and store prototypes from the streets of Thailand – and beyond. And they can be anything; that's the point. Bastards aren't limited to buildings. They're usually just objects or design hacks Chat notices as he's wandering around. Things normal architects wouldn't even consider 'architecture'.

"Bastards may include a rundown shack in a neighbourhood chumchon (slum)," the project website reads, "a local street vendor cart, a bastardised shophouse, or a make-shift sidewalk bench. Bangkokians walk past Bastards every day, but would never consider them as serious design."

"I wanted to define it loosely," Chat says, "so it could be architecture, or it would be a bench, or an alley, or an air-conditioning unit. Bastard just means someone who doesn't know their father, right? So bastard architecture is just architecture that doesn't have architects.

"That's the reason I chose 'bastards', rather than some high-end architectural lingo, like 'hybrids'. Right? I purposely chose a word that was non-academic, and that was impactful and wide-ranging."

The easiest way to explain the Bastards is to look at some examples. The first is a boat that transforms into a bridge, named Boat/Bridge (coming up with names for stuff is, oddly, an area where Chat's inexhaustible genius kind of gives up). See, in the canals around Bangkok's Bang Plee Floating Market, local workers had a problem. They needed to cross the water regularly, but tourist craft and other long-tail boats also needed to get through. Sure, you could have thrown a lot of money and complicated engineering at some sort of retractable folding bridge, but the market workers didn't have that kind of cash. So they jerry-rigged their own solution, using two long-tail boats and a simple pulley system.

When locals need to cross the canal, the long-tail boats are pulled across the water, forming a bridge. When tourist craft need to get through, the boats are pulled back. The whole thing probably cost as much as a can of Coke.

"To me, this is Thailand," Chat says. "Ingenuity, hacking, improvisation. Bastardisation at its best. This happens whenever people are constrained by economics, by lack of whatever. When people are in a tight spot, they have to think with little money, little time, little effort, little help. When you're squeezed into these situations, you're forced to improvise."

When Chat finds a Bastard in the wild – a local design hack, like the Bang Plee Boat/Bridge, or an example of invention in the face of constraint – he documents it. And this is what makes Bangkok Bastards more than simple poverty porn. Chat draws these projects in minute detail, with a list of numbered parts. And not just from above, but using cutaways and cross-sections too, so what started as a simple boat-bridge thing now becomes a useable template. A prototype that architects and designers can apply to their own projects elsewhere.

"I draw," he says, in the same tones that a priest might say, 'I pray'. "I draw, draw, draw to understand. And I draw not only the boats, I draw the filthy water, the corrugated sheets, the stray dogs, the motorcycle delivery drivers. Because architecture in Thailand isn't just buildings; it's all of these things that make an environment."

And you might think, so what? How does a couple of long-tail boats and some rope help you design buildings? And the truth is, it might not.

The point of the Bastards is to gather ingenious solutions and share them with as many young designers as possible. It’s the architectural equivalent of the old lady who collects bits of string because you never know if they might come in handy one day. Not every Bastard will be relevant to every architectural project. And that’s okay.

"My ultimate goal isn't for me," Chat says. "It's to help build a foundation for how Thai students and architects can tap into their own Bastards – to create a global design language that's unique to them.

"It isn't the form of these hacks that inspires me; it's the thinking. This is design. Right out of the box."

When Chat began noticing Bastards, and presenting them back in 2007, the idea of reverse engineering architecture from everyday objects or 'hacks' was so radical – even to local Thai designers – that people didn't really know how to respond. The general reaction was, "Huh?"

"When I first presented these Bastards at a lecture, the moderator – who was a professor and an architect – she said, 'Do you like these things because you're American?'" Chat shakes his head and smiles. "Meaning she placed me in the same group as these Americans in Bermuda shorts who get off the plane and take pictures of stray dogs and garbage.

"And I said, 'No, I just think we need to look at things around us more closely. I'm excited by these things. It isn't just a shtick for me to sell my stuff. Now, of course, everybody's kind of into this idea of 'localness', but when I started doing it, people were like, 'What the fuck are you doing?'"

It might be hard to envision how a Bastard can grow from a street-engineered something into an actual building, so let's look at another example. Back in 2012, Chat was walking past a new Bangkok condominium development – a depressingly anonymous wall of glass and steel – when he noticed something interesting. Not the building itself, but the building attached to the building.

See, construction workers in Thailand usually live on the work site, and are often forced to build their own accommodation, which results in these shanty-looking structures at the foot of much larger, high-rise condos; shacks cobbled together from plywood and sheet metal and whatever else the workers can scavenge from the build site.

"When you first look at these construction worker dwellings, they may look like garbage, or a slum," Chat says. "But to me, they're beautiful. They're full of this kind of authenticity and way of life.

"But I didn't want to just be seduced by this romantic ideal of the slum, so I would go in with the team and we'd measure and draw these worker dwellings very accurately."

By studying these makeshift accommodations, Chat began to understand them. And what made them tick. The interior structure was mostly steel – rainproof, sure, but also stuffy and uncomfortable. What made the dwellings work was an exterior scaffold of wood or bamboo, which became a kind of de facto living space. "It was a buffer between sun and rain," Chat says, "but also this amazing multi-purpose social space for cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, getting drunk, whatever."

Instead of worrying about cladding and windows, workers would use construction tarp, literally rolling up walls to let in light or create a cross breeze. None of them were trained architects, but that didn’t matter. They’d created a Bastard. And to Chat, that meant something he could use.

Fast-forward several years, and one of Chat's clients came to him with a project. He'd recently purchased an old Bangkok 'Love Motel' , and he wanted to transform it into high-end, designer accommodation. Could Chat help?

As a big fan of Love Motel architecture ("You literally can't find a building in downtown Bangkok that has a courtyard in the middle anymore") Chat was excited by the potential. And when it came time to draw up the plans, he turned to one of his original Bastards: the construction worker shanty dwellings. That bit of string had come in handy at last.

Instead of knocking down walls to make the rooms bigger, Chat built small cantilevered beds on the outside of the original structure. Then he covered the gaps in scaffolding; just like the construction workers had done. These scaffolds not only allowed servicemen to access air-conditioning units more easily, without disturbing guests, they also became "vertical stages" for street parties and neighbourhood concerts.

"It's my own bastard scaffolding," Chat says. "It's turning a once mysterious, dark, scary love motel into a new type of bright, liveable space. We called it Samsen Street Hotel."

With Samsen Street Hotel, you can see the entire philosophical journey, from Bastard to Beauty. From makeshift, hack-built dwellings to award-worthy, architectural design. Chat even kept the original Love Motel tunnel – where visitors used to arrive unseen. It now leads guests to an open-air cinema, complete with interior scaffolds, so people can sit on the upper levels, legs dangling, and watch movies by twilight. "The scaffolds force you to turn out and watch the movie, but more importantly, to look at other guests and talk to them," Chat says. "There's always interesting conversations between Japanese and Dutch tourists, you know. It's much better to be out here than in your hotel room with the air conditioning, playing on your phone."

Chat's mission now is to grow his Bastard encyclopaedia, to make it as rich and hyper-detailed and accessible as it can be. He's even spreading the Bastard message far and wide, visiting Japan and Korea and teaching students about their own design hacks, their own local Bastards, little nuggets of invention and creativity hiding in plain sight.

"I always say I'm not an activist," he says. "I'm not necessarily trying to make the world a better place. I just want to find a way to create architecture that has authenticity. And when I'm on stage, and I'm showing the students these floating boats, these food carts and construction worker houses, I can see a light in their eyes. And I think that light is the beginning. When kids think, 'The stuff outside my home can actually lead to designs like this?' That's how we create a globally impactful architecture."

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