Table of contents for Special 2 in BluPrint

Workshops are the birthplace of the most wonderful creations, where people share knowledge and put skills into practice. It’s a space of intimacy, personality, and sociability–three characteristics embodied by the Diesel Open Workshop, a kitchen and bathroom collection by Scavolini in partnership with Diesel. Just like a busy workshop, the kitchen consists of several functional areas with various languages and materials. Metal and glass make up the strong industrial approach of the collection as the technique from aluminum forms and soft steel finishes meet the style of smoky and ribbed glass designs. The Stock Rack system brings inspiration as the starring role in this collection as it introduces modularity through its clever mix of solids and voids which makes for limitless composition possibilities. These key design features are also found…

This year marks LAUD Architects’ tenth and eleventh time to be shortlisted in the World Architecture Festival. My First Skool at Segar Garden is one of Singapore’s largest Early Years Centers, caring for 380 young children. According to the designers, “The façade, made with operable glass louvers for ventilation, faces the park to maximize green vistas from each classroom. Ventilation blocks allow the west-facing façade to breathe while being shaded by rows of landscape, which in time will grow thick enough to filter traffic noise.” The design encourages kids to be active. Long ramps running through the three-story building make children (and their parents) to walk to class rather than use the elevator. It’s working. The kids clock well above the recommended daily fitness goals of 10,000 steps, averaging 15,000…

“Passion for architecture and sense of duty are important to us,” says Lim Koon Park, principal architect of Park + Associates. “Architecture is not just another job. You can’t insist on work-life balance, because you can’t look at the clock and say, ‘Time to stop architecture, it’s time for play.’ We don’t encourage that. We want people obsessed with design.” The firm’s driving concern is to push the envelope in aesthetics and construction. “We make sure that when the project allows for it, we put in additional resources so as not to recycle old ideas. Say you need 100 man-hours on design for a project. Instead, we spend 150 man-hours to hopefully produce a high level of design. We don’t have to do that. We still get the same fee.…

“Form follows feeling—a collective or cultural feeling,” answers Wannaporn ‘Pui’ Phornprapha, founder and managing director of P Landscape, when asked for her opinion on the statement, ‘Form follows feeling.’ “We come from a culture where function often follows form, and form follows spiritual functions,” she explains. Phornprapha enjoys using nature as a medium for creating experiences. Her work concentrates on contemporary landscape architecture that reconciles art, ecology, and cultural heritage to maintain and enhance the built environment. P Landscape values the uniqueness of the cultural identity of the people and places they work with, and Phornprapha doesn’t mind when people fail to recognize P Landscape’s authorship so long as they enjoy the places her firm designs. “The holistic and multidisciplinary nature of landscape architecture that integrates art, culture, ecology, social…

“The process of ‘reinvention’ distinguishes all of our work—past and present—and rests on a duty to design well and to design responsibly, whether that is at the scale of an airport or a door handle,” states the boilerplate sent by Foster + Partners Thailand Limited partner and director Sunphol Sorakul. “The last decades have witnessed key shifts in public attitudes to ecology and energy consumption. We have always anticipated these trends, pioneering design solutions that use completely renewable sources of energy, and offer dramatic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Environment awareness is an integral part of the practice’s culture as it evolves to meet the challenges of the next fifty years.” The Bangkok office Sorakul joined Foster + Partners in 2004 and worked on large-scale mixed-use projects in the UAE,…

What do they like most about designing? The answers of Cor Jesu’s collaborators couldn’t be more different. “Connecting people and making them happy,” says Kenneth Cobonpue, the conceptual designer of the Sacred Heart School – Ateneo de Cebu chapel. “It started when I was a kid when I would give my mom toys I made from scratch by hand, which always put a smile on her face. So I tried to do that for the rest of my life.” Then there’s Buck Sia, the architect-of-record and principal of Zubu Design Associates, who likes “Beating myself up to seek for a new idea or develop an investigation.” Sia says he thrives on tension—challenging the status quo and eking out his place as a design leader while demonstrating a strong sense of…

“My works always blur the boundaries between art and architecture. I articulate sensual spaces with meaning. Concept-driven projects that are sensitive to the environment, culture, and technology.” The entry The 38-year-old graduate of the Architectural Association in London describes the experience of the Infinity House as “falling into an Escheresque rabbit hole and into an anomalous garden of raw concrete with oxidized metal, bentwood, and textural stone.” The germ for the design began as one of four laser-cut wood sculptures Calma made for an art exhibit called “Assemblages” in 2016 at Provenance Gallery. The homeowner took a liking to one of the pieces, envisioning it as the inspiration of a house. “When I make models, I see them as possible projects. They could be a new typology of a house,…

Redesigning your home, while exciting, can be quite a daunting task. There is a tendency to stick to plain colors, traditional-looking furniture, and conservative pieces due to the plethora of choices. These elements all seem to fit together perfectly but they lack personality and can seem flat. Add some flair through contemporary items for a truly modern home. Here are some tips to get you started: Partner up plains and prints Most people would say that prints should remain minimal in order to avoid clashing with the other elements in the space, but we say otherwise--prints bring life to the room, while plains harmonize with them and give emphasis. Liven up your living room with a bright sofa paired with patterned chairs, and throw in some plain and colored pillows…

White Matter’s works range from hospitality, residential, and commercial projects in Thailand, Taiwan, and Cambodia. FURI Times Square Mall is the first mall and, therefore, a celebrated structure in the coastal city of Sihanoukville in Cambodia. The USD 10 million shopping complex is a joint venture of FURI Real Estate and investors from Macau and Hong Kong aimed at Chinese tourists, who have dominated the tourism growth in the city for the past years. Covering one hectare of land and four stories high, the shopping mall is environment-friendly, according to FURI Times Square project director Chin Chanlen in an interview with Khmer Times. The mall has two volumes—one shaped like a triangle and the other almost like a boomerang—connected on the top levels. With glass all over, brise soleil keeps…

Design architect Melvin Gamayot suffered sleepless nights back when he was figuring out how to redesign the Church of St. Alphonsus, better known to Catholic devotees in Singapore as the Novena Church. Inspiration came from the Old Testament’s First Book of Kings, Chapter 6. Four times in the chapter, it describes King Solomon carving “cherubim, palm trees, and flowers” when he built the Temple of the Lord. True to inspiration, winged cherubim stand guard by the entrance, the limestone columns look like clusters of slender palm tree trunks, and flower buds adorn the intersecting vaulted ribs of the ceiling. The original structure, built in 1950 by Swan and Maclaren, Singapore’s oldest architecture firm (founded in 1887) stands newly restored beside the towering neo-Gothic Church of St. Alphonsus. It is cgnArchitects’…

The number three seems to be a harbinger of good luck for this three-year-old practice based in Bangkok’s Talad Noi heritage quarters. Creative Crews’ first stab at the World Architecture Festival and INSIDE Festival of Interiors has yielded them three shortlist nods for projects that couldn’t be more different from each other: their own office, housed in two repurposed row houses; a rustic farm stay seeking to rejuvenate traditional vernacular architecture; and finally, a multi-sensory classroom for a school for the visually impaired. Studio director and co-founder Puiphai Kunawat is no stranger to joining the WAF, having won previously in the Future Project Residential Category for Somdoon Architects, which she co-founded after working for respected Singapore practice, WOHA. The decision to enter WAF again this year was one she and…

The word ‘hypothesis’ predictably turns up a lot in our interview with this 20-man multi-awarded Bangkok-based firm. Going through the interview, one realizes that the studio’s mantra, ‘We always question to form a hypothesis,’ goes beyond a glib PR spiel. The very act of questioning, especially the things people take as givens, produces the eye-catching and out-of-the-box ideas Hypothesis routinely turns up with. The design agency, whose services go beyond architecture to interior design and place branding, describes their design approach as heavily ‘research-based.’ However, their work is anything but formulaic as their award-winning works show: they’ve won top honors in INSIDE twice, in 2015 for their greenhouse-inspired interior reuse of an old warehouse for restaurant Vivarium, and in 2017 for Ir On Hotel, an industrial age-inspired hospitality project which…

For the young architecture and interior design studio, FLAT12x, there are two sides to the growing globalized approach to architecture. “It brings things together, which is good for us to mature and refine our work,” remarks co-founder Julsamano Bhongsatiern, who says speedy access to information aids development. The downside is, “it’s too quick, too soon, too pictorial, image-overload, which devalues architecture.” The 8-man studio takes the constructive mindset and aims to foster informed and meaningful architecture one project at a time. Bhongsatiern, who founded the studio with Pasda Sophon and Chakrit Sripradup barely three years ago, describes the studio’s work as “architecture that does the fundamental things right and comes with questions to examine those basics through different contexts, cultures, backgrounds, and time.” Design process Bhongsatiern, who founded the studio…

When John Ryan Santos attended the World Architecture Festival 2018, he figured, “We have something to show.” With climate change the most pressing concern in discussions at the festival, Santos felt it would be worthwhile to share his team’s ideas on disaster-resilient and compact hospital design. “We want to showcase to the global community that Filipino hospital architecture has important lessons on how to build hospitals. Because of local conditions (economic, infrastructure, climate, and so on,) we’ve learned to build hospitals that are economical, operationally lean, and disaster-resilient,” says Santos. The shortlisted entry The four-year-old firm, John Ryan Santos + Partners, works exclusively on healthcare projects, a specialty Santos has focused on as a solo practitioner since 2004. The firm’s shortlisted entry, Sagip-Kanlungan, is a compact hospital model with a…

“It all starts with a story, a perspective of reality that we decide to act on. How we choose to act on this reality is a form of design. In my work, it’s important that what we create belongs to those who will use and maintain the building over time. My role as an architect is to make those stories visible, to question them, and eventually give form to them by making something together.” Alexander Furunes’ description of his design approach is the story of how Streetlight Tagpuro, an orphanage and community center in Tacloban, Philippines, was designed and built after the original facility was swept away by Typhoon Haiyan’s 300-kilometer winds. The story captivated the judges and those listening to the presentation of Norwegian architect Furunes and his co-lead…

“Please be nice,” said one finalist. “Please be brutal,” said another. And so the World Architecture Festival finalists got an exhilarating and satisfying mix of tough queries, insightful comments, suggestions, and encouragement from the crowd of 80 architects and designers at the technical rehearsal hosted by BluPrint and Grohe. The WAF is the only global architecture competition that requires shortlisted architects to defend their work in live ‘crits’ before an international jury and audience. The tech rehearsals that BluPrint and Grohe hold (this year is our fourth) are intended to help our finalists prep for the WAF crits. More importantly, they model for the local community how we might conduct substantive critiques. Unfortunately for our country, the professional design organizations discourage critiquing. The aversion towards questioning and saying what’s what…

Bold and human. That’s B+H’s claim about their studio culture, approach, and designs. In this case, a porous and cohesive ecosystem where two institutions—one for teaching and the other for healing—would cooperate to optimize their services for their respective publics. The National University Centre for Oral Health, Singapore (NUCOHS) will serve 500 patients a day when fully operational, a 40 percent increase in the hospital’s capacity. The center will offer subsidized treatments for the elderly and those with special needs. It is built with treatment rooms for patients who are not mobile, for those with claustrophobia, and those with behavioral issues. In addition to clinical dental services, the building will also house dentistry education and research facilities, including labs to accommodate 80 students and specialized labs for post-graduate specialists. According…

Integrating Play and Reverence for the Dead—that’s how the architects and landscape architects of CIAP Architects and ONG&ONG headlined their submission to the World Architecture Festival. It’s a controversial juxtaposition that causes one to pause and reconsider what we do with places for the dead. In the Philippines, memorial parks are projected as sites of solemn beauty. For most days of the year, the manicured grounds are as still as the dearly departed they host. They come alive on the week of All Souls’ Day and All Saints’ Day, when families come to pay their respects and, to the surprise of foreigners, spread out picnic blankets, playing cards, and mahjong sets. Relatives bond over food, beer, and prayer, sharing stories over a game or two—or an all-nighter. So maybe the…

“WAF is the Oscars for architecture!” Phuttipan Aswakool, co-founder of Architectural Studio of Work-Aholic (ASWA), gushes when asked what pushed him and partner Chotiros Techamongklapiwat to join the prestigious competition for the first time. The team of five submitted the BitWise Headquarters project, a metal-clad office building with a gravity-defying cantilever in Samutprakarn, Thailand, which garnered a shortlist under the Completed Buildings: Office Category. The team was ecstatic. “Being shortlisted this year means a lot to my tiny team, as it meant our project has already won recognition by our peers,” says Aswakool. The design process A darling of architecture news sites, their playful body of work a fixture in many Pinterest architecture pegboards, ASWA has been quite prolific since its founding in 2013, having penned nearly 50 projects. What…

“We would like to be acknowledged as a sustainable landscape design firm that placed environmental concern ahead,” professes TK Studio founder and managing director Tawatchai Kobkaikit. “We are fascinated with designs that relate to environmental concerns and sustainable landscape design. Therefore, we position ourselves as a firm that combines the quality of life and a healthy environment in every project.” TK Studio is Kobkaikit’s third design firm, and it runs according to his values. He believes that “landscape design should create a resilient habitat and accentuate its intrinsic and extrinsic values in all aspects.” Design process “Every design process should consider equally all members of the same ecosystem—human beings, plants, and other living beings,” says Kobkaikit. “It should aim to improve their quality of life.” According to the landscape architect,…

“Culture imparts architecture with soul,” JUTI Architects founder Juti Klipbua offers when asked about the role context and culture play in the design of spaces. He cited two Thai case studies he says are evocative of the firm’s approach: the Vanessa Cabaret Club and the Chalalai Pool Villa. True enough, these two very distinct commissions wear their context proudly and quite literally too. The cabaret club incorporated the flash befitting its typology, bringing to mind Thai sequins and traditional costume motifs. The pool villa, situated in the lush countryside, repurposed old railway tracks and threads for its façade, creates continuity between past and present while being environmentally responsible. The two typologically different projects showcase the technical range of the nine-year-old studio of six. However, technical knowledge and technological advances are…

“Alero” is Spanish for “eave.” When brother and sister Jesy and Jaemi Cruz were studying interior design and architecture, their father, a civil engineer, would often admonish them to use generous eaves in their designs. “We live in a tropical country!” he reminded them. The constant reminder to design for living in the Philippines stuck and as the siblings began their practices, their concern for designing with sun-shading and passive-cooling techniques expanded to designing for cultural and socioeconomic context. When brother and sister decided to establish their design firm in 2015, they named it Alero Design Studio in honor of their dad’s influence on their outlook and values. The studio, says Jesy, stands for being “progressive, empathic, optimistic, and Filipino.” The shortlisted entry The Baliwag Community Center will be the…

“Winning is a blessing that was not expected,” says Benjee Mendoza, one of the principals of BAAD Studio, which the World Architecture Festival Super Jury awarded Highly Commended Future Building of the Year after BAAD won the Future Building – Civic and Community category last year in Amsterdam. “To be honest, my partner and I never joined to compete. We were intrigued by the idea of sharing who we are and how we respond to our local situations, and wanted to see how people from other countries would take it.” The winning entry BAAD Studio’s submission was a redevelopment plan for the Sunken Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes of Cabetican, a massive Brutalist church five to six meters buried in ash and lahar after the horrific explosions of Mt.…