The Water Parliament - Bangkok City 2100 TYLER LIM, A SINGAPOREAN STUDENT AT THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE, IMAGINES HOW THE FUTURE BANGKOKIANS WILL LIVE TOGETHER WITH THE FLOOD IN HIS M.ARCH THESIS
TEXT: PRATCHAYAPOL LERTWICHA
IMAGE COURTESY OF TYLER LIM
(For Thai, press here)
As the world is witnessing more severe natural disasters and unpredictable weather conditions caused by climate change, the slogan that started out as a joke, ‘Bangkok; a livable city underwater’ doesn’t seem so farfetched now.
Tyler Lim, a student from the National University of Singapore’s Master of Architecture program, imagines a scenario in the future where the Rattanakosin area of Bangkok is underwater, for his master’s thesis. Titled ‘The Water Parliament – Bangkok City 2100’, the work reflects the importance of ‘water’ in Thai people’s way of life, culture and beliefs through the three integrated infrastructures that allow people to live with water.
Spiritual Embankment Design Booklet
The Spiritual Embankment serves to prevent water from flooding the city’s important historical sites. The embankment is also home to a series of functional spaces such as an aqua healing place that helps visitors feel spiritually enlightened, accompanied by a food court, a bathhouse, a water market, etc.
Inhabitable Scaffold Design Booklet
The Inhabitable Scaffold provides people with living and business spaces with the scaffolding structure that can be expanded into three other phases and includes its own rainwater storage facility.
Mangrove Lagoon Design Booklet
Mangrove Lagoon is a line of coastal defences designed to rest along the Chao Praya River as Rattanakosin Island’s abundant ecosystem and aquaculture, as well as the city’s ecotourism destination.
The Water Parliament – Bangkok City 2100
Benevolent Symbiotic Urban Growth in the three
The three infrastructures are presented in a series of images with apparent stylistic elements of traditional Thai mural paintings, telling different stories and depicting scenarios in one connected narrative. Lim told us that while he is aware that the work doesn’t suggest a realistic and all-around solution to the problem, he does hope that the thesis will encourage people to seek out new possibilities to survive and coexist with future environmental unpredictabilities that has climate change as the root cause.