“They were afraid that communists were going to take over Bangkok. So, my grandmother gave my parents some money, and we fled to America,” said Chatpong Chuenrudeemol matter-of-factly, speaking of his parents’ choice to flee their homeland of Thailand when he was seven. While the communists never took Bangkok, his family remained in America for a few decades, making him a citizen of both countries. 

“Somehow, to everybody’s surprise, I remained deeply attached to Thailand. I’ve always retained this soft spot for the country and a sympathy and affinity for the things happening there. As a result, I was never fully Americanised,” he recalled in a fully American accent that perhaps partly accounted for why no one expected his return. 

“I came back to Thailand every year and never lost touch. I never forgot the language,” he added.

However, armed with a Harvard Master’s in Architecture from the Graduate School of Design (GSD), return he did. “After graduating in 2000, most of my peers at Harvard were going off to start new jobs in New York, San Francisco, or planning to remain in Boston at these high-flying firms.” This was the era of star architects. A GSD degree guaranteed a spot in one of the prestigious, high-profile American firms whose unparalleled growth spurt was being catalysed by increased global work. “I just felt like there would be more exciting things happening in developing countries in Southeast Asia—that all the action was outside of Europe and America.”

At the time, two shifts were underway. “Globally, there was a shift in architecture,” Chat explained. As a student, Architecture—’with a capital A’—had been ruled by theory and form-making. The beginning of the new millennium marked the tail end of the parametricism that had defined the 90s, an era buoyed by emerging computer technologies and software like Autocad, which had transformed most architecture studios into sleek operations, and brought an end to the drawing board as the definitive tool of the trade. Now, the sustainability movement was beginning to have a voice, disrupting theory’s dominance over production in architecture. Meanwhile, popularised by the growth of the internet, the field was also gaining more public visibility than it had ever previously enjoyed. 

“During that period, It seemed like more people became knowledgeable and interested in design in general and didn’t buy the almost overbearing theoretical aspect of architecture anymore. People had their ideas of what architecture should or could be, and how it should be more populist and could connect to the common person without the necessity of having a grasp or even understanding of theory as background. It fits firmly into my frustration with architecture going back to Berkeley, where I had studied for my undergraduate degree. I didn’t believe in architecture that normal people didn’t understand. I had been drawn to Paul Groth, a landscape architect who was one of my professors there and had introduced the notion of the cultural landscape—mundane, everyday things like streets, farms, billboards that created space but weren’t buildings. They were like everyday architecture. So, when I graduated, I strongly desired to discover my own meaning or definition of architecture.” 

For Chat, a move to Bangkok—far-removed from the architectural community in America and Europe—was a first step to addressing this need. 

“As soon as I moved back to Thailand, I realised how all that I learned at Harvard and Berkeley—and what I now call the ‘studio education’ I got from that experience—was not enough to really create architecture for a Thai, tropical, Southeast Asian context,” he said ruefully. 

Around the same time, Chat’s father had been thinking about building a new family home in Thailand. This became Chat’s first built project in Bangkok. “It was the worst piece of architecture you could probably imagine,” he laughed. “I tried to use every strategy I learned in school in that one building. You can’t imagine how bad it was.”

With his Ivy League qualifications, and in a marketplace craving work that reflected the Wallpaper* magazine aesthetic, the house only buoyed his reputation. Under the banner of BAR (Bangkok Architectural Research), he and his partner slowly built a name for themselves as a boutique go-to studio for a procession of wealthy clients seeking that look.

“At that time, you had people like me coming back from America or Europe to teach at Thai universities, with the idea that they could create these facsimiles of Western schools like the AA (Architecture Association) or GSD, so you can imagine what that looked like. You’re the new thing. You’ve been educated abroad and are a kind of ‘great white hope’ coming back to a developing school, where everyone would easily buy into all this Western theory from someone they thought was so worldly and educated.” 

The new architecture across Bangkok—defined by “glass boxes” or “an exotic, romanticised tropical modernism… detached from the real grit of Bangkok”—reflected this.  

“We were just preaching stuff we had learned from overseas and putting a few cosmetic touches here and there to create what seemed like a new language, but it wasn’t anything new,” Chatpong said reflectively. By his confession, for a period, he enjoyed the notoriety and quasi-fame that graduating from an Ivy League and knowing all this Western theory brought. “But soon, I knew I was bullshitting myself,” he added.

“You go through the motions of doing a project, getting it photographed and published, even have some work on the cover of some fancy design magazine, and then, at a certain point, you look at it, and you’re like, that’s not very good,” he said. 

The reality was that a few of their buildings leaked “because of just the most basic technical misunderstanding of roofing in a tropical context—both the practical and theoretical aspects of architecture. I decided to be honest with myself and had to admit that, on some level, the work I was doing was terrible, detached and soulless, and that it didn’t have a sense of place. It was a big, uncomfortable moment of self-realisation,” he acknowledged calmly.

Chat knew that the remedy to this wasn’t going to come from looking at other people’s architecture or more design. “I realised then that there wasn’t a well-documented architectural history of Thai typologies or a manual that one could tap into. I realised that practitioners in developing countries were in a dilemma. Our only option to practise smart, intelligent architecture was in Westernism, Western modernism, or historicism, because no substantial work was being done to write, record, and theorise our architectural history. If I wanted to do something rooted in Thai culture and not just ape or mimic the ideas many of these celebrity architects were producing—perhaps perfect for their contexts but not necessarily suitable for Thailand or elsewhere—I needed to begin from Zero. So I started to look more closely at what was around me and educate myself. That became the realisation of the Bangkok Bastards work.”

2007 was a definitive year. Dissatisfied with the quality of work they were producing, Chat informed his partner in Bangkok Architecture Research (BAR) of his feeling that “we were not going in the right direction”, a revelation that would lead to his eventual departure. Married and with a three-year-old son, Chat thus began the process of building a house for his own family. It was the turning point of his unshakeable “struggle with architecture”.  

Located in what he described as  “the end of a cul-de-sac in a typical Bangkok residential neighbourhood full of detached dwellings with no connection to the street”, the house required an approach far from the one he had employed at BAR. “It didn’t start with just design. Instead, it started with research.” 

He went through a long period of closely observing life in the neighbourhood and on the street. “I looked at the fences and all the neighbours’ walls to understand that boundary. It became clear that the most important elevation of the house wasn’t the building, but this raised wall on the street—that’s your first public face of the house.” 

The resulting L-shaped house opening into a room-like courtyard was built using local materials and stylistically borrowed and improved upon some of the aesthetic flourishes Chat observed and photographed as he went about Bangkok. It’s also designed to open up and easily blend into the street. “It was the first bastard,” he said with a smile.

“Bangkok Bastards” is Chat’s terminology for “homegrown architectural concoctions created by everyday people … to solve everyday problems … in everyday life.” Born out of years of close observation of how people build for themselves without any expert input from professionals like engineers or architects, it has resulted in a unique architectural style that has become Chat’s calling card and the foundation of his award-winning research, design and teaching practice as Chat Architects.

When I asked, “Why Bangkok Bastards”? Chat beamed, clearly having anticipated the question. 

“Well, ‘Bangkok’ is the capital of Thailand,” he began. “I love living and working here, and I no longer feel like I need to go and become ‘international’ or work in America or Europe to be recognised as I might have felt necessary at some point in my life. So that’s my way of acknowledging that Bangkok is my laboratory, home, and the place to which I’m most committed. 

“A ‘bastard’, by definition, is an offspring of unknown origin—a son or daughter of unknown parentage. It’s often used as an insult to describe a person with no class or pedigree. I wanted a word that was not architectural (like ‘hybrids’, which would have been a more obvious choice) but rather something very raw. I wanted an everyday word that everyday people would immediately understand and connect with on some level.”

In simple terms, the reasoning behind the phrase “Bastard Architecture” was based on the idea that a “bastard” refers to a person without a prestigious background or lineage. Similarly, “Bastard Architecture” describes buildings and structures made by impoverished or disadvantaged individuals in society. These structures are often overlooked and labelled as slums by professionals who view them as poorly constructed and lacking intelligence. The term emphasises these constructions’ informal, resourceful, and hybrid nature; how they solve problems through improvisation and without strict (if any) theoretical foundations. They result from messy, impure, non-linear approaches, which mirror the complexity of life. 

“I still find it funny how ‘Bangkok Bastards’ as an expression pisses off some quite intelligent architects.
It’s uncomfortable for them,” he said.

A formative example of a Bangkok Bastard was a temporary structure constructed by workers on a building site in central Bangkok in 2012. Fascinated by both its scale and structure—it was built using surplus scaffolding material found on the site of a skyscraper, where, having no accommodation elsewhere, the contractors both worked and lived throughout the duration of the construction process—Chat initially went in to photograph it. 

“As soon as the construction project is done, that structure disappears, so waiting to document it, I started to measure and draw with some of my team, this ordered messiness which we wanted to understand,” he said. “On close observation, it soon became clear that this construction worker house was composed of two elements. The main was a 2.4 square metre room that was very hot and humid. But interestingly the thing that made it liveable was the scaffolding on which it was built. It allowed for a kind of transparency and air circulation around.” 

There were also some unexpectedly elegant details throughout the structure that excited the team.
Determined to capture these elements, Chat and his team began creating renders and drawings that subsequently led to an important insight. 

“I began to realise that if I wanted to do something new, I needed to throw everything I respected out, including that very clean GSD aesthetic, which I had been trained on. At that moment I also decided that in the work I was going to do from that point on, I had nothing to prove to my professors or even my peers.” 

One seemingly small but significant decision was the nature of drawing itself. “I wanted to put texture into the drawings, but also find a way to capture and include the people living in the building within the drawings, not just in research photographs. So, not only was the bastard approach in my subjects, but it had to be in the way I express architecture too. I pushed myself to really do drawings that were full of life, and not minimalist in any way, as I would have before.”

More projects to document and capture other bastards at various scales followed, revealing the adeptness with which specific construction hacks and uses of materials like tarp and corrugated iron, lost in the formal practice of architecture, were ubiquitous across Bangkok. “As we looked at the elements of more and more of these bastards, we realised that they aren’t just form-making or survival strategies. They are much more than that. They address all the problems of urbanism—who builds, how we build, where and what we value…stuff like that,” Chat explained. They are adaptation strategies responding to and evolving within fragile systems, with endless hacks developing from each previous one as necessary: ”bastardising the bastard”, as Chat says. Documentation of more Bangkok Bastards became a crucial part of his studio, leading to the establishment of a parallel practice called Chat Lab—a think-tank dedicated to exploring, documenting and learning from Bastards. Chat Architects meanwhile focuses on developing architecture inspired by and evolving what Chat and his team are learning from their close observation of the Bastards. 

“We are learning to refine and create a new architectural and design language that isn’t formally based, but is strategy-based instead,” Chat explained. “It’s been a process of learning to realise and understand that what something looks like doesn’t matter as much as what it achieves and how it does so. We have learnt that if you throw away any type of romantic attachments and notions you might have about these architectures, then you throw away, too, that they need to look a certain way, and what you’re left with are a set of strategies. For example, this means as a practice we do not have to go and do an architectural project finished in corrugated panels in an attempt to make it look like it’s related to the slum. We could do it in travertine or marble and it might cost tens of thousands of dollars to build but still be a Bastard. The spirit is to learn without prejudice, and value certain strategies that we are taught to dismiss as having little value. Not paying close attention and valuing them is our collective loss.

“I started doing research on these Bastards because I felt I was ignorant in trying to do architecture that was fitting for Bangkok,” Chat said. “I wanted to be able to design and make better buildings so I did research first and foremost to learn—to teach myself. It wasn’t out of some latent academic desire to acquire knowledge in research. I’m not about that.

“I’m not a social activist either. I don’t do these projects to help the world. I do these projects—all of my research—because there is architectural merit and value in all of them. I won’t document a bastard if it’s boring. If it doesn’t have some extra spatial, tectonic, architectural redeeming qualities, I’m not going to record it. I don’t do it to save the world,” he continued.

“In the end, I’m an architect, I’m not a social activist, which I notice is very important for the new generation of architects, many of whom feel like architecture is a form of social work. For me it is not. You look at all these awards and projects, some of which are just terrible design, but get recognition because they’re seen to be helping society somehow. For me, that’s just a crutch. We have gone through that with the green movement in architecture before. The problem is that you end up doing everything other than good design, which is for me the main job. I’m not interested in that. All said and done, I’m still an architect and I do my research to create better Architecture.”