ABSTRACT
Chulalongkorn University (Chula) in Bangkok, Thailand, has navigated deterministic neocolonial and neoliberal geographies by successfully asserting Thailand’s distinctive geography and history. As the first school of architecture established in the most important public institution of higher education in the Kingdom, Chula’s Faculty of Architecture developed the social and cultural tools for crafting a distinctive approach to the internationalization of architectural education. This chapter entangles the binary discourses based on the cardinal navigational directions of North/South and East/West by closely examining the recent history of the internationalization of architectural education at Chula. These reflections, grounded within long-term, multinational academic experiences, examine the cryptic ways of thinking that colonize pedagogies under the tropes of civilization and capital. In order to counter the logics of both Eurocentric neocolonialism and U.S.-derived neoliberalism in the internationalization of architectural education, I argue that the complex geographies of architecture’s collective intellectual heritage and modes of practice at Chula generate different models of architectural education at the intersections of the humanities and social research. This case study demonstrates that the reform of architectural education today can be achieved by recognizing transversal forms of decolonial knowledge production beyond geographic and disciplinary boundaries that are tied to the specific and local needs of diverse people and places, and to notions of humility and civil service rather than dictates of professional self-interest, power and prestige.
