Sites of Empathy
Kulapat Yantrasast
WHY Architecture, Los Angeles& New York City
A VISIT TO A MUSEUM SHOULD BE LIKE ENJOYING A GARDEN OF IDEAS AND STORIES
In the summer of 2022, I met up with Kulapat Yantrasast, founder of the Los Angeles–based architecture firm WHY, for steamed dumplings on a balcony overlooking the circular courtyard of Art Basel, in Switzerland. Wearing his trademark bright-colored jumpsuit, the architect greeted passing acquaintances every few seconds, it seemed. Cheerful and energetic, Yantrasast, who is in his early fifties, is a ubiquitous presence on the global art scene. His biography predisposes him to be the epitome of the twenty-first-century culturally multilingual, peripatetic architect: a youth spent in Thailand; early career in Japan, working alongside Tadao Ando, minimalist master of concrete and light; eventually founding his own studio in California, the seat of today’s and tomorrow’s cultural industries. Yantrasast’s practice extends beyond architecture to landscape design, furniture making, cuisine, and other creative pursuits. Uniting his museum projects is a belief in human-centered buildings that are open and accessible to all.
ANDRÁS SZÁNTÓI recently had the pleasure of walking through your extension for the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, as well as your galleries in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, in Los Angeles. What guides your thinking about museums?
KULAPAT YANTRASAST Museums, with their Western origins, are sites of presentation and exclusivity. They were driven by class identities and exhibiting rare possessions. Museums consequentially symbolized a singular culture with a capitalC. Architecturally, then, most historic museums were built as temples—for cults more than cultures. But this obsolete notion of the museum as a temple is on its way out. What we need now is a new and inclusive cultural platform.
Working in various places in America, I was shocked and angry to learn that many people were historically barred from going inside museums. The path toward becoming a relevant place for cultures in the twenty-first century demands a full acknowledgment of the lessons of the past and a radical inclusivity that is open to all people. This must be achieved in both the hardware and the software of the museum, architecturally and programmatically.
We definitely seem to be in a critical moment in the history of the museum.
The awakening of the museum from the software perspective has been clear. The decolonizing of the museum, equality, and inclusivity are among the most critical issues of our times. Yet when it comes to museum architecture and design, these subjects are still not being addressed head-on. If museum architecture doesn’t evolve, the museum as a social institution will become irrelevant. It will not fit the new programs that societies need in order for us to grow and thrive as a whole.
You once described your practice as architecture that makes people like each other. Where does that aspiration come from?
I was born in Bangkok, Thailand. My parents are Chinese and Thai; I am a cultural mutt. Bangkok has a radical, inclusive social fluidity. Everyone looks out for one another in an intrinsic connectivity, almost like an ecology of plants. I then went to study in Japan and lived there for fifteen years, eight of them spent working closely with Tadao Ando, my mentor. But despite my deep love of refined Japanese cultures, I came to feel that as we keep abstracting architecture, we miss some essences of real living, of that diverse mash-up or spontaneous improvisation—a vibrant sense of being human. I felt the need to combine my Thai and Japanese roots, and figured America would be a good ground for exploration. Here, I hope to develop a clear yet complex architectural language while incorporating other voices, disparate interests, and even conflicting agendas into one shared architecture.
In which of your museums do you feel you have accomplished that goal?
The Grand Rapids A
