Surrounded by an equal amount of condos as well as older surviving constructions in the heart of Bangkok’s Bang Sue district—a former site of official and bureaucratic dwellings now paving the way for a more contemporaneous but still hybrid urban fabric—Thai architect and academic Boonserm Premthada’s residence and office, Bangkok Project Studio, comes bearing a host of peculiar but intriguing propositions. These propositions, urbanistic at first and speaking to the larger composition of our cities, and personal after, seek to bring into question conventionalities in house-building, which is perhaps the most primal and single largest type of construction activity across the world, without the need to essentially subvert them basis utility. In that, the claim of Premthada’s residence being only 50 per cent designed is as much a metaphorical statement to the house being as 'alive' as the residents that occupy it, capable of driving its own metamorphosis, as it is a logistical move geared towards the economy of construction and saving costs. It is, at the causal risk of overstating, at once a rather pragmatic inevitability as well as a remark on the architect’s oft-lambasted obsession with finality and marionetting the house to an elusive completion.

The project’s intriguing nomenclature too draws from these dualities. The titular Back here alludes to the neglected backyard in the house, more often than not relegated to household utilities, and seen as additional space that can easily be encroached over in case the need arises. An essential ligament in the house’s functioning, it is not the most marketable of spaces while often serving the most indispensable purposes of the home—washing, drying, storage, or even vantage and such. The house here sees a subversion of the backyard space, firstly, and then moves into initiating a well-intentioned subversion of the typology itself by means of that. Morphing into an open courtyard that abuts one edge of the house, the backyard serves as a scooped-out volumetric anchor for the residence, visually and spatially linking three floors. “A rethought backyard results in a different form of this left-behind space”, states Premthada in an official release. The eponymous back of the house thus essentially becomes the front, and much of the residence, in this way, unfolds as a reclaiming narrative.

The other reclaimant narrative manifest in the house, an alternative expression and understanding of the word “back” that seems to guide the design ethos of the house, is the backward relegation of construction in the overall design process; lower down, or bottom of the list even, seen separately from designing, especially vis-à-vis the aesthetic or visual appeal of the final product. A standout element, the house’s facades and several internal walls are materialised in exposed fly ash bricks with a weeping mortar finish. While that adds to the organicity and rawness that Premthada wanted to imbue the house and especially its construction with, the rather elemental nature of the finish—ironic since it wantonly evades finality— alludes to simplicity itself. It brings to the fore “the hidden side of the construction techniques that have always been left at the back of the house,” which at the same time is in agreement with Premthada’s 50 per cent completion philosophy in the house. While on philosophical overtones, one may pronounce it aspires to a sense of dialogue between intangibilities and tangibility, the designed and the built, as with all of the construction, bringing forth the balancing act that is architecture itself.

That dialogue is even more personal and proportionally profound considering the house and office are Premthada’s own, with a clear view to exemplify the kind of architecture he and his practice wish to put out into the world. Along with my previous coverage of The Grid by Ad Hoc Practice in Hanoi, Vietnam, this project too serves to stand as pedagogically driven architecture that supersedes primary utility, the strong rooting in theory directly speaking to prowess in architectural communication. While both projects frame an essential antithesis to conventionality in architectural construction and practice as it were, Premthada’s residential design possibly reflects and hopefully influences a larger urban picture, though of a nearly disparate urban acumen and system in Bangkok compared to Hanoi—even if both cities stand at the cusp of defining a critical regionality and distinct urbanity in Southeast Asia. 

The open back courtyard lends additional visual stimulus in either direction, featuring a prominent balcony and sit-out space that earmarks the pronounced volume of the ‘backyard’. Further inwards, a stylised open staircase overlooking the courtyard and affixed to it, stages intermittent pauses for reading along the ascend, plus a storage area for books toward the third floor, the uppermost in the house. The first and second floors consist of a hallway, bedrooms, and the courtyard space itself, all reserved for the family. The bookcase cum stairway culmination affront Premthada’s drawing studio and workspaces for his team. Speaking rather poetically on the more emotional aspects of these spaces, Premthada states, “The curtain is slowly swayed by the wind, carrying the fragrance of the trees. Birds chirp in the morning. Damp air wafts from the rain that has just stopped. Rainwater slowly flows down the protruding mortar on the walls of each floor. Afternoon sunshine and night stars. The cascade of roofs of various shapes in the neighbourhood. These are the energy of the house”.

Back of the House, Premthada explains, was akin to going back to basics for him. The “50 per cent designed” attempts to create a balance between what he terms “contextual”—of the neighbourhood—and “inner” atmospheres, precluding the house’s confines. The residual 50 per cent, he claims, is left to be “fulfilled by nature, time and the environment”, or the near metamorphosis of abstract, intangible processes that transform house to home. The risky proposition of a sentimentality in such a statement is just as well founded as the process we talk about—the organic transformation of an architecture in the strictest, brick-and-mortar sense, to a habitat that suitably houses people, the proverbial home. While that process conspires rather silently through generations sometimes and is hard to underpin—especially at the secondary risk of imparting unearned agency to architecture—interventions such as this christen the phenomenology by bringing it into the conversation. "My house does not represent any achievements but reminds me where I came from and how the 50 per cent design approach can become the hope of future housing,” Premthada didactically concludes.