Off the Grid: An artist refuge in post-rural Thailand

Throughout modernism, avant-garde movements have often sought inspiration outside urban centres, finding remote places—rural areas, deserts, or islands—as frontiers for radical experimentation. From the ecological movements of the 1960s in the United States to today’s ‘Raumpioniere’ in provincial Germany, these initiatives reflect a common desire to create self-sustaining refuges away from the compromises of city life.

In the late 1990s, Thai artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert launched The Land project in the rice fields near Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. What began as a single project has since grown into a colony of art structures—a collaborative, open space that welcomes both the local community and visiting artists. Designed for year-round inhabitation, The Land offers a retreat for off-the-grid work, embracing community, artistic experimentation, and interdisciplinary exploration.

The architectural design studio under the guidance of Habitat Unit at TU Berlin was invited to create a holistic concept for The Land. The studio was structured in three phases: students first explored the concepts and cases of global counter-urbanisation movements, then visited The Land to study its spatial, social, and ecological context, and finally developed design proposals for a self-sustaining artists’ workshop and residence. Their designs addressed issues of sustainability, daily coexistence and infrastructure, energy production, and communal self-organisation.

The studio was conducted in collaboration with Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Architecture and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, as well as the architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller, artists Tiravanija and Lertchaiprasert, and the Cologne Institute for Architectural Design (CIAD). The studio’s work was later showcased at the “Haushaltsmesse” exhibition at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in 2014.