Nakhon Pathom, Thailand​
400 sq.m.


A gazebo in a tropical garden​​

Baan Klai Wat is a long-stay retreat for a Thai couple who mostly live in the USA. They desire to stay in a walking distance to the temple their parents routinely visit on Sunday morning. The house is designed to echo this journey to the peace within, one which constantly explore the relationship between the tangible - the body / the architecture, and the abstract - the mind / the space.

In designing the house, its state of being is constantly questioned. Is there a room? Where is the boundary between inside and outside? Spaces are walled-in or walled-out? What is figure and what is ground? Where does living space end and landscape begin? All of which are intentionally left unanswered. These ambiguities create this house where its state of being is so unclear that every space is a void, a neutral state where everything is possible, where phenomena are allowed to take place at any given moment in time. The interrelationship of them build the architecture and the lack of it, simultaneously and repeatedly.

Right there, in the middle of nothing, through the gentle breezes of Southwestern monsoon wind, under the flooded tropical daylight, among textures and shadows of millions of leaves, inner peace might as well be in a walking distance.