Hubba-to Co-Working and Artisan Space

Bangkok’s tech boom is well underway, and brightly detailed co-working and maker spaces are popping up around the city to accommodate it.

Bangkok, the teeming capital of Thailand, has more than its share of wonders: its ancient temples, its outré nightlife, even the longest official name of any city in the world (a 168-letter, rarely used, honorific). But among its lesser known highlights is a booming tech industry, one that’s attracted a cosmopolitan cultural element for which the city—with its population already surging toward 10 million—is now rushing to provide urban amenities. Enter Hubba-to, a new co-working space created by local firm Supermachine Studio. The third in the growing Hubba chain of shared office suites scattered around town, the latest location takes the “-to” suffix from its location within the Habito mall, a commercial complex surrounded by an all-new high-rise development of 5,000 residential units east of the historic center. Also, “it’s to make it sound Japanese,” says Pitupong Chaowakul, Supermachine’s founding principal: Everything in the new district is aimed to appeal to an international crowd, and Chaowakul (who prefers to go by “Jack” with English speakers) designed Hubba-to with the same audience in mind. “They need activities and a space that suits that community,” he says. Hubba-to caters to the entrepreneurial set with spaces that serve not only the computer-programmer but more hands-on creatives as well. “It’s co-working plus artisan space,” Chaowakul says, noting that the facility’s conventional offices are complemented by painting studios, ceramic and wood workshops, and darkrooms, making it a destination for makers of all descriptions. A screening room and lecture hall, as well as an ample kitchen, give the space the potential to act not just as a working environment, but as a social one too, living up to the “hub” half of the title. Supermachine’s formal approach started with a visual token of that networked, integrated sensibility—Hubba’s logo, a web-like figure that the architects tried to expand into a comprehensive spatial concept. Ultimately, “it’s a net that connects dots,” Chaowakul says, and the firm quickly struck on a way to carry the winding, linear geometries through the whole of the interior: They used the piping that serves the mechanical and electrical systems, painted it in livid turquoise, and snaked it from room to room in dramatic bands. Celebrating those kinds of service details is hardly novel (one thinks of Paris’ Centre Pompidou, and of the High-Tech movement of a generation ago), but endowing them with this sort of symbolic resonance is novel. It’s also, Chaowakul says, symptomatic of his office’s work. “We try to look at those banal objects around us, taking ready-made forms and creating a different result.”

Project Credits
Project: Hubba-to Co-Working and Artisan Space, Bangkok
Client: Hubba; Sansiri
Designer: Supermachine Studio, Bangkok . Pitupong Chaowakul, Yupadee Suvisith (project team)
Contractor: Project Direction; TTS Engineering
M/E Contractor: Mobilize
Size: 989 square meters (10,645 square feet)
Cost: Withheld