“For Thai people, water is life. In the past we welcomed and celebrated water like a friend,” says landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom. “But today we face it with fear, a threat to our modern life.”
Voraakhom’s practice creates solutions to that threat through water-efficient design and carbon-sequestering landscapes such as green roofs and urban farms, forests, wetlands, and grasslands. Fusing tradition and modernity, nature and technology, she addresses the effects of climate change on cities endangered by the very water that gives life to their inhabitants.
Bangkok-born Voraakhom accompanies us on a brief journey into the sources of her inspiration and the landscapes she has designed in the two-minute film To Live with Water, made by Mercedes-Benz’s global She’s Mercedes initiative. Over a montage of graceful shots that contrast overbuilt Bangkok and its congested highways with the lush, verdant Thai countryside, Voraakhom tells us, “As our cities become paved in concrete, I want my homeland to breathe again.”
And not just her own homeland. In 2011 she founded the Bangkok-based landscape architecture firm Landprocess and, in 2016, the Porous City Network, a social enterprise that fosters environmental resilience throughout Southeast Asia. As Voraakhom points out, this multinational region of peninsulas and archipelagos has the longest coastline in the world, making it especially vulnerable to rising sea levels. Add to this the region’s increasingly intense monsoons and rapidly developing cities that cannot absorb much rainfall, and you can see why living with water is her urgent concern.
Bangkok is built on the Chao Phraya River floodplain near the Gulf of Thailand, and floodwaters that inundated the country in 2011 (65 of Thailand’s 76 provinces were declared flood disaster zones) spurred Voraakhom to establish her firm. In the film, she visits a Buddhist temple that 40 years ago was on dry land but now stands as an island, completely surrounded by water. We also see her travel through city, wetlands, farmland, and forest by foot, boat, and automobile (in the Mercedes-Benz EQ Power plug-in-hybrid car).
Most impressive is the stunning aerial view the film gives us of Voraakhom’s Thammasat Urban Rooftop Farm on the Thammasat University Rangsit campus in Tambon Khlong Nung, north of Bangkok. Built in 2019, at 236,806 square feet (20,000 square meters) it is the biggest urban farming rooftop in Asia. Her terraced design echoes the forms of traditional rice agriculture used in Thailand’s mountainous terrain while employing modern technology to capture, absorb, filter, and retain runoff—purifying rainwater and growing a variety of organic food for the campus.
Voraakhom, who is on the faculty at Thammasat, works with young landscape architects to help the next generation address the challenges wrought by climate change. Her Chulalongkorn Centenary Park, is at once a beloved oasis and a complex water management system for its sprawling Bangkok neighborhood. The park’s storage system can hold nearly one million gallons of water during severe floods and then dispense it during the dry season. The first critical piece of green infrastructure in the city, completed in 2017, it has won both architectural design awards and popular acclaim.
To Live with Water evokes the flow and stillness of Bangkok’s waterways, the city’s history and its modernity—themes that echo through Voraakhom’s work. Where once residents called themselves amphibious, the contemporary city is sealed in concrete. Her landscaped structures bring water back into harmony with the built environment. This short film is meditative yet energetic, cautionary yet hopeful. It’s an ode to an artist who is not just working toward a better future for urban development but is already having a big impact on people’s lives today.
It’s a worthy piece of content from She’s Mercedes, a platform highlighting inspirational women and their work towards sustainable living.
As a landscape architect on complex, large-scale projects, Voraakhom appreciates engineering excellence. But her imagination invariably draws nourishment from a deeper source. She says, “I am forever in awe of nature’s design.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for She's Mercedes.
