This Spring 2026 Option Studio at Harvard GSD that investigates the Bangkok shophouse as a form of smart urban infrastructure. Working with DEPA, Thailand’s Digital Economy Promotion Agency, the studio examines how informal economies, mixed-use building typologies, and bottom-up neighborhood systems can support new models of urban intelligence, positioning the shophouse not as obsolete “urban trash,” but as an adaptive framework for architectural, social, and technological transformation.

My project brings together the hydraulic lifting logic from Kerala with the open ground-plane logic of Bangkok’s sidewalk and thai tun. The design reimagines the shophouse by removing the walls from the first floor, creating an open underbelly that allows movement, activity, and floodwater to pass through.Within this open floor plan, I introduce a system of movable platforms that can rise and fall depending on need.

During the dry season, these platforms become flexible floors for dining, markets, gathering, storage, work, or other informal programs. Their different heights create a variety of spatial conditions within the same open framework.During the rainy season or flood events, the platforms operate as lifting devices, moving people, objects, and goods from the ground level to upper floors. In this way, the project turns the shophouse into a flood-adaptive system. It does not erase informal urban life, but gives it a flexible infrastructure that can respond to both everyday use and future climate risk in Bangkok.