BUCC is a project that critiques, challenges and questions today’s identities and activities of the youngsters as well as new policy in Thai society. For the past few years, Bangkok university has one of the most active organization to echo Thai government’s campaign of transforming the country from a agricultural and industrial based economy into the one that relies more on “creative economy.” A small division called BUCC (Bangkok University Creative Center) has been set up to experiment and implement new activities with the students.
The facility occupies 1st and 2nd floor of the university brand new building, BU landmark. The most important program for the division is workshop where students from different faculties can participate in different programs provided. The facility is meant to be very open, playful and expressive to encourage the students to communicate more thus come the creative environment.
With our long interest in simple mechanistic architecture we propose to BUCC to clad the existing lift core with “Lo-Fi pixel wall” as an extra message board at the entrance for the students. There are 10,000 pieces of custom made plastic units installed on the 180 m2 lift core surface. Each of them has 4 colors; pink, blue, green and yellow. The students can change the wall’s colors simply by rotating the pixel units. They can leave messages for their friends on the wall as well as experiment on its color pattern so the wall will be constantly changing (with some very simple acts.)
Constant changes and flexibilities are the main concern to originate creativity. A lot of other elements in BUCC have been designed to support the idea. In the workshop, we fit the internet corner into a spaceship-like unit and it is relocatable. Students can push them to different corners thus creating different space depend on what kind of activities that they want. And next to the spaceship there is the topographical shelves that accommodate BUCC’s books collection as well as be a collective bench for students to sit on and discuss their works.
The idea of flexibility goes the BUCC’s office too. The staff’s working table is designed as a continuous plane attached to the leaning wall. There is no clear division of whom the area on the table belongs to. The working territories shrink and expand according to the staff’s communications.
