Project Credits & Specs:
- Architects: ASWA (Architectural Studio of Work – Aholic)
- Landscape Design: LAAB
- Photographs: Phuttipan Aswakool
- Location: Bangkok, Thailand
- Area: 230 m2
- Year: 2022
ASWA designed a new office with an irregular-shaped construction inspired by their product, a vacuum skin packaging film for the food industry. The unformed functional space conveys the concept of a variable appearance following the shape of an object it wraps. The office has two courtyards; a greenery court and a water court, which allow natural light to shine into the space.
Sevenlakes company is the creative office that leads food packaging in Thailand and is a specialist in thermoforming packaging for flexible packaging. ASWA offer the idea of how to represent their new headquarters which architecturally starts from their product. The interior space of 230 sq.m. fits for 6-8 staff seating, ten seat meeting room, and the area for the managing director room.
Approximately 400 square meters, the site is close to the Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok and is surrounded by a low-rise residential building and empty lowland. The new office tends to amplify their product, the thermoforming packaging, and translate it into an architectural language. The triangular volume with the trapezoid plan shape comes from the idea of thermoforming packaging, followed by the functional inside.
The highest volume of 6 meters is next to the roadside for the staff area, which fits 6-8 people, and the ceiling is inclined to a meeting room and a managing director’s room. The steel structure is selected for a structural design to play a prominent role in this project because it can provide an irregular shape with a wide span. The exterior material of black trapezoid volume with two scoop courtyards is a metallic black aluminum composite that clads all over the building to perform as a single-sheet wrapping material like the company’s thermoforming packaging product.
The functional layout can separate into three parts; the staff area on the left side, the meeting area on the center, and the managing director’s room on the right side. The entrance is on the oblique side of the trapezoid plan, which has a deck for the welcome area and a curved background wall that allows staff to relax during their break time or after work. The first glimpse of the space, when entering inside, is the surprising scoop greenery courtyard with natural light providing for the staff area, while the meeting room shares a view on the shortened side. Besides the big yard, this building still has another surprising scoop pool court for the managers’ to enjoy with their children during the weekend.
The project description is provided by the architects.
About the architects:
ASWA (Architectural Studio of Work – Aholic) is a Bangkok-based studio founded in 2013 by Phuttipan Aswakool + Chotiros Techamongklapiwat, who carries out its design journey through experimentation with materials, architectural forms, and characteristics of interior spaces that correspond in equilibrium with the use of natural light. For ASWA, a design is conceived from a thorough analysis of each project’s surrounding context before being translated into its architectural language.
