thingsmatter

thingsmatter is an art and architecture collective led by Savinee Buranasilapin and Tom Dannecker. The partners grew up in urban Thailand and rural America, respectively. They met in architecture school at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, then attended Princeton University and eventually established their practice in Bangkok.

The studio’s early work included a series of temporary interventions in commercial spaces, offering a critique of the consumer culture that hosted them, while celebrating the opportunity for communication with a diverse audience and the material extravagance uniquely provided by shopping malls and trade shows. Their work evolved, extending the working methods, tactility, and human scale of event architecture to more permanent buildings, including private residences.

A growing preoccupation with delicate, indeterminate structures and unfinished materials, alongside an interest in the cultural status of building as a process, has led thingsmatter to shift focus from conventional buildings toward constructed artworks, which remain anchored in an expanded field of architecture.

In Bangkok, they've taught, lectured, and conducted workshops at Chulalongkorn, Silpakorn, Kasetsart, Rangsit, and Bangkok Universities. Overseas, they've lectured about their work at Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia, and several international conferences.