Photo by Franc Pallares Lopez
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Singapore is a beautiful city to work and live in. And I was also part of DRIA (Designing Resilience in Asia). It is a student competition that originated from NUS (National University of Singapore). In 2018, I was part of the team that represented the student entry of the Technical University of Darmstadt, where I studied. In 2019, the DRIA competition conference moved to Taiwan, and last year, we were supposed to be at SoA+D in Bangkok, but obviously it was cancelled. This year’s DRIA will be held online.
CL: What caught my attention was your project that I saw on Instagram, a farmhouse migrant learning centre at Mae Sot, Thailand. So, I thought how did I not know about you guys before? JG: You probably have! I think FuturArc did a feature on us on the previous collaboration that I was working with. So before, from 2012 to 2016, we were working as a.gor.a Architects. So a.gor.a Architects was founded in Mae Sot, together with a Spanish architect Albert Company Olmo and a Norwegian landscape architect Line Ramstad. From 2012, we started doing projects together on the Thai-Burma border. And maybe we did not particularly design and build adobe, mud brick or earth brick buildings in the beginning; we focused on community architecture and social architecture for sure, and we worked a lot with bamboo and limited resources. We collaborated until the end of 2016 and then I founded
Simple.Architecture. I was splitting my time between Bangkok and the border region of Mae Sot.
CL: That’s fantastic. I love that sort of architecture because in Asia, what is precedent or what is given more priority is mostly advanced building technologies. We don’t really get to see enough of low-tech, rustic local buildings and building materials. So, when I see them, I jump at the chance to find out more. So here we are. Tell me a bit more about your journey into social architecture and what got you interested to move in this direction. JG: My partner joined me here in Singapore after completing her studies in London. During our time in Singapore, she was trying to find work within the development sector. But it turned out to be very difficult, so she decided to move on. In mid 2011, she started work as a fundraising manager for a community- based organisation called Mae Tao Clinic on the Thai-Burma border. The hospital was founded by Dr Cynthia Maung in 1989, who left Burma during the Saffron Revolution and set up this hospital in the Thai border town of Mae Sot. The hospital grew in size and became an important health facility for refugees and migrant communities from different ethnic groups, especially the Karen. I was still in Singapore at the time, finishing off my contract. Afterwards, the idea was to travel to Thailand, take a couple of months off and then we would move on to other places. I arrived there in early 2012, and she told me she wanted to extend her contract for another two years. That was the time when I met Albert and Line, who were already doing small projects, and then we started working together. We realised there was a lot of demand. The transition from doing corporate architecture into what we were doing was very fluent. I wasn’t really looking back. There were issues, problems, demands for schools, shelters, dormitories, hospitals… and we immediately jumped into those projects. We learnt about earthen bricks from Pun Pun Organic Farm, a sustainable learning centre in northern Thailand, near Chiang Mai. We started doing
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