Practicing Tropicality, Planetary Site with Architect Rachaporn Choochuey

Geoffrey Bawa Trust

This lecture will explore how architecture can remain light, adaptable, and resilient in the face of heat, humidity, and rapid urban change.

Siam Nivasa

The talk explores a design practice rooted in the permissive, improvisational conditions of Bangkok, now extending across regions shaped by heat, resourcefulness, and flux. Through collaborative experimentation, <a href="https://www.allzonedesignall.com/" title="https://www.allzonedesignall.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">all(zone)</a> creates light, adaptable architectures that emerge from tropical realities—not as exotic exceptions, but as vital tools for living well amid planetary change. Here, tropicality is understood not only as a climate condition, but as a way of life—improvised, porous, collective, and always responsive. It is a mode of building that embraces the cycles of materiality, working with what is available, renewable, and often overlooked, to create spaces that breathe, shade, and transform over time. These architectures offer lessons rooted in Southeast Asia, yet shaped by—and addressed to—a planetary site where futures are already taking form. This lecture is the first in a series of presentations and workshops by architects visiting Sri Lanka from Thailand. The Thai Architecture Programme is a collaboration between the Geoffrey Bawa Trust and Royal Thai Embassy in Colombo. Rachaporn Choochuey is a Bangkok-based architect whose work responds to the evolving challenges and possibilities of life in tropical megacities. In 2009, she co-founded all(zone), a design studio built on close collaboration and continuous experimentation. Drawing from Bangkok’s uniquely informal and improvisational character, the studio explores a contemporary vernacular—not through nostalgic replication, but through material resourcefulness, social lightness, and a distinct sense of play.Her practice investigates how architecture can remain light, adaptable, and resilient in the face of heat, humidity, and rapid urban change. She frames Southeast Asia as a critical planetary site—a living context where strategies for a warming and interconnected world are already being tested. Through architecture, she offers not solutions, but invitations: ways to live well with change, through design that is soft, porous, and joyful.This design inquiry is grounded in deep academic engagement. Rachaporn taught for two decades at Chulalongkorn University and has held visiting positions at institutions including the Yale School of Architecture and Columbia GSAPP. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo and her M.S.AAD. from Columbia University.