Next Project
Serjeant Award for Excellence in Drawing

In Search of Memory’s Vessel

Part 1 Project 2025
Chanunchida Phonoi
 The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL | UK
Architecture here begins with the body and the fragile persistent gestures of my Thai Chinese grandmother following her stroke. It becomes a medium for cognitive and cultural continuity. This project rethinks domestic space through the lens of stroke recovery, intergenerational care, and diasporic identity, using her lived rituals as a starting point. Her everyday gestures such as gardening, cooking, and tending to Buddhist and Chinese altars form a spatial and cultural archive where movement, memory, and material are deeply connected.

Instead of a conventional site led approach, the project begins with motion. Through detailed observation and motion mapping, I document habitual acts that persist despite memory loss including selecting a porcelain bowl, picking herbs, and kneeling before an altar. These gestures are translated into architectural notation and spatial language, creating a design rooted in the body’s rhythms and rituals.

Set in Samut Sakhon, a coastal province shaped by generations of Teochew migration, the architecture draws from material memory and local craftsmanship. Bencharong porcelain, hand forged gardening tools, and carved teak altars are reimagined as tools for cognitive and cultural continuity. The home is shaped by ritual and routine, supporting healing that is spatial, cultural, and emotional.

This project challenges dominant models of elderly care by embracing cultural specificity, softness, and tactility. It expands sustainability to include continuity of self, craft, and community, making architecture an act of devotion that sustains memory when memory fades.

Tutor(s)
2025
In Search of Memory's Vessel: Project Description
Ritual as Foundation The project begins with the daily act of preparing flower offerings in a Thai Chinese Buddhist household. This intimate routine reveals a choreography of care, where body, object, and material are closely intertwined.
Drawing Through Gesture Using Thai Chinese flower arranging as a generational form of knowledge, this study translates the interaction between hand, tool, and material into drawing.
Home as Living Archive This project moves beyond the design of a singular architectural space to reinterpret memories collected across Thai Chinese households.
Memory as a Design Methodology This project reimagines domestic space through the fragmented lens of memory, redesigning everyday objects from childhood as a third generation Thai Chinese family.
Material Memory Material and color choices in this project serve not only aesthetic and tactile functions but carry memory, craft, and cultural identity.
Ongoing Construction of Memory Reconstructed from fragments of domestic space and memory, this project reimagines the architecture of the Thai Chinese home through routine, ritual, and generational care.
Craft as Cultural Memory This workspace is inspired by my grandmother, a former jeweller whose eye for form and intricate detail reflects a wider tradition of Thai Chinese ornamentation.
Spaces of Continuity The design draws from a collection of Thai Chinese blue and white porcelain, assembled by my grandmother over decades.
Full Bleed Render
• Page Hits: 641         • Entry Date: 07 August 2025         • Last Update: 27 November 2025