Excerpt: Baan Klai Wat, a house by Physicalist, is designed to echo the journey to the peace within, one which constantly explores the relationship between the tangible – the body / the architecture, and the abstract – the mind / the space. Baan Klai Wat is a long-stay retreat for a Thai couple.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] Baan Klai Wat is a long-stay retreat for a Thai couple who mostly live in the USA. They desire to stay within walking distance of the temple their parents routinely visit on Sunday mornings.
The house is designed to echo this journey to the peace within, one which constantly explores 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 a figure and what is the ground? Where do living space end and landscape begin? All of which should be answered. These ambiguities create this house where its state of being is so unclear that every space is void.
In this neutral state, everything is possible, where phenomena are allowed to take place at any given moment in time, where definite meanings of things are unnecessary. Their interrelationship of them builds the architecture and the lack of it, simultaneously and repeatedly.
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 within walking distance.
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