Ong Siew May (OSM) Professorship

We are pleased to welcome distinguished architect Ar. Rachaporn Choochuey, who will join the Department as the Ong Siew May (OSM) Distinguished Visiting Professor for Semester 2 of Academic Year 2026/27. During her visit, she will contribute to the education of Master of Architecture (M.Arch) Year 1 and Year 2 students through AR5802 Options Design Research Studio II and AR4101 Design 7, offering critical design guidance and insights drawn from her extensive professional practice and international experience.

Rachaporn Choochuey (Ar)
She is co-founder of all(zone), a Bangkok-based studio founded in 2009 and informed by the ever-changing conditions of tropical megacities, as well as the contemporary vernacular intelligence embedded in everyday life. Formerly a faculty member at the Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, she now lectures and teaches internationally, and has held visiting appointments at the Yale School of Architecture and Columbia GSAPP.

My research develops Practising Tropicality, Planetary Site as a framework for understanding architecture under planetary conditions shaped by uneven climate, extractive histories, and infrastructural volatility. Rather than treating “the tropical” as a geographic category or an aesthetic, I approach it as a set of operational questions—how architecture mediates heat, moisture, water, and exposure; how built form registers social and ecological unevenness; and how spatial practices adapt when stability is no longer assumed. Within this broader agenda, I study instability not as an exception but as a recurring condition that reveals the limits of universal standards of comfort, enclosure, and control.