Atelier 2+

Worapong Manupipatpong and Ada Chirakranont are Atelier 2+, a Bangkok-based design studio. The duo studied at KMITL in Bangkok and at Konstfack in Stockholm and their designs show that Scandinavian Design is a concept that is not limited by nationality. In their work they seek to erase the boundaries between architecture and furniture, art and design.
Like many other people who visit Sweden, or who live there for a period, it was nature and the Swedish approach to nature that made the strongest impact on Worapong Manupipatpong and Ada Chirakranont. For a duo coming from Bangkok what was most memorable about the years spent in Stockholm was always having nature on one’s doorstep. “Greenhouse is a product of our stay in Sweden,” Worapong Manupipatpong explains. “When we were living in Sweden we felt the need to get closer to nature and to make room inside our dwelling for the nature that surrounds us.” “But,” they point out, “perhaps the size of Greenhouse encourages people to create miniature worlds because it is not large enough for people merely to plant just anything in it. It makes demands on the user, perhaps requiring green fingers or the sensitive touch of a sculptor.” “Usually we work with larger-scale projects,” Ada Chirakranont adds, “projects that are in the borderland between art and design,” she continues. The activities of Atelier 2+ range from buildings to interior architecture and furniture. The Greenhouse represents a sort of scaled-down version of the installations and interconnected huts with pitched roofs that they showed in Bangkok and that had their origin in Space In-between which was the title of Worapong Manupipatpong’s graduation thesis at Konstfack in 2009.
Ada Chirakranont and Worapong Manupipatpong acknowledge that even in tropical Bangkok there are too many buildings and not enough green space around. “Bringing the green into interior space is a pleasure for us, because we simply love plants.” says Worapong Manupipatpong ”We want to help create indoor gardens with a straightforward and very structural design language.”