Chatpong Chuenrudeemol Lecture: “(re)defining the pedigree of design”
Chatpong Chuenrudeemol, Principal and founder of CHAT Architects
Chatpong Chuenrudeemol (Chat Architects) joins us to challenge current discourse in the realms of (re)presentation, community engagement and empowerment, and construction techniques. What if our hands understand the weight of labor and sweat to construct our buildings? What if the language of construction is not through line weights and elegance, but the hard sound of hammer under the summer sun? What if the manifestation of our designs weren’t of walls, floors, and windows, but of rituals, dances, and ancestors?
Chatpong Chuenrudeemol (Chat Architects) is an architect, teacher, and multidisciplinary designer from Bangkok whose work forefronts issues around collective wisdom, community empowered design, storytelling, and activism. His work amplifies mundane landscapes such as neighborhood shacks, street vendors carts, and sidewalk benches. These structures are rhythms and lifeworlds that everyday people concoct from discarded, cheap and salvaged materials to solve everyday problems in everyday life. These entanglements of the unpedigreed are lived in rhythms following moon cycles, lineages, and geological knowledge. In contrast, the institution is steeped in imperial jargons of “social justice, resilience, regenerative, materiality, and circularity” - capitalized in our school as new forms of pedagogy. Chat’s engagement will bring the latter. It steeps in the knowledge held by the hands of ordinary bodies whose histories are rarely cited, and looks to re-imagine design, (re)presentation, and construction as one that forefronts hope amidst a world that has shoved our existence into question.