Guest editor, texts and images: Moritz Henning
Bauwelt 16.2026
Pages 50-65
In northern Thailand, far from the feverish megalopolis of Bangkok, an architectural scene has emerged over the past few years that stands for a new understanding of architecture in the region. The city of Chiang Mai, shaped as much by a centuries-old craft tradition as by modern industrial production, has become the point of departure for practices that bring together local materials, traditional building typologies, and contemporary forms of expression.
Chiang Mai already held a similarly pioneering position once before, in the 1960s, when the campus of the newly founded university became a laboratory for a tropical modernism. It was above all through the buildings of Amorn Srivongse, one of the most important Thai architects of that era, that the step was taken from an architecture still bound to traditional building forms toward a modern language that drew its inspiration from climatic conditions as much as from new construction techniques.
In late 2025 I was able to see the university campus in Chiang Mai for myself – and to visit two of those practices, Sher Maker and Yangnar Studio, which studied at Chiang Mai University but have since struck out on their own and today, somewhere between Lanna architecture and the hardware store, pursue their own distinct approach to material, craft, and industrial production.
Once again, I was given the opportunity by the German architecture magazine Bauwelt to fill a couple of their pages wih text and photographs.
Issue 16.2026 also contains three book reviews by me: Spaces of Belonging. The architecture of Muzharul Islam by Niklaus Graber, Architectural and Cultural Guide East Polynesia by Natascha and Philipp Meuser, and Brutalist Korea by Paul Tulett.
