About FORUM

1) Designing for Local Climate

Topic: Heat, Wind, Shade: Designing Buildings That Breathe

Concept note:
Across Asia, climate is not a background condition—it shapes daily comfort, energy use, and health. This topic explores how design can respond to heat, humidity, dust, rain, and seasonal extremes using orientation, shading, courtyards, ventilation paths, and passive cooling strategies. The focus is on architecture that performs naturally before it depends on machines.

2) Building with Natural Materials

Topic: Mud, Stone, Bamboo, Lime: The New Material Intelligence

Concept note:
Natural materials are no longer “rustic”—they are strategic. This topic looks at the contemporary return of earth, stone, bamboo, lime, timber, and natural composites, and how they can be used with precision for durability, comfort, and low carbon impact. It also highlights sourcing, detailing, maintenance, and the aesthetics of honest material expression.

3) Craft and Construction Techniques

Topic: Hands That Build: Craft as Structure, Detail, and Identity

Concept note:
Craft is not decoration—it is a construction logic. This topic focuses on how traditional skills (joinery, stonework, brick bonds, lime plaster, jali work, bamboo weaving, local roofing systems) can create stronger, more expressive architecture. It invites dialogue on reviving craftsmanship as a livelihood system and integrating it with contemporary building timelines and standards.

4) Rethinking Traditional Typologies

Topic: Courtyard to Community: Old Typologies for New Life

Concept note:
Traditional building types evolved from real needs—climate comfort, privacy, community, and efficiency. This topic explores how typologies like courtyards, verandahs, stepped plinths, streetside thresholds, bazaars, chowks, and cluster housing can be reinterpreted for today’s housing, institutions, and mixed-use development—without becoming nostalgic replicas.

5) Learning from Vernacular Architecture

Topic: Vernacular as a System, Not a Style

Concept note:
Vernacular architecture carries lessons in climate response, resource efficiency, social organisation, and adaptability—often built with limited means but deep intelligence. This topic positions vernacular not as an aesthetic, but as a design system that can inform contemporary work. It encourages architects to study principles—orientation, massing, thermal performance, water logic, and community patterns—and translate them into today’s contexts.

6) Culture and Space

Topic: Ritual, Everyday Life, and the Architecture of Belonging

Concept note:
In Asia, space is shaped by culture—how people gather, eat, pray, celebrate, rest, and move through thresholds. This topic examines how architecture can respond to local behaviours and shared memory, creating spaces that feel rooted and familiar. It also asks how designers can avoid “theme-ing” culture and instead design with authenticity and respect.

7) Identity in Urban Design

Topic: Streets with Soul: Urban Identity Beyond Facades

Concept note:
Cities lose identity when development becomes uniform. This topic explores how streets, public edges, markets, transport nodes, waterfronts, and civic spaces can reflect local character through scale, material, shade, signage, trees, and public life—not just iconic buildings. It focuses on building urban identity through lived experience and human-scale design.

8) Rethinking Design Education

Topic: Teaching the Ground: Making Design Education More Real

Concept note:
Future architects must learn from the ground—materials, labour, climate, communities, and construction realities. This topic examines how design education can move beyond image-based output toward research, fieldwork, mapping, prototypes, and making. It encourages stronger engagement with local building practices, sustainability, and culturally rooted thinking as core academic skills.