House on the Side of the Mekong

Abstract

The Mekong River is a life source and space for spiritual belongingness that binds people on both banks, yet it also serves as an unnatural territorial boundary that divides northeastern Thailand from Laos. This thesis speculates on the nature of the Mekong middle basin’s fluid zone of exchange, whose state of “in-between” is constantly renegotiated by those living along it. Specifically, it explores embedded meanings within local fishing practices, spiritual cohesion, and border subversion against the logic of a national boundary to represent indigenous spatial imaginaries of the riverway. For northeastern Thai and Lao people, the Mekong embodies an assemblage of ideas about a cultural conception of space wherein animals, spirits, and humans comingle to influence one another. Sited along the river at the edge of a border town, the project proposes a guesthouse for ghosts, fish, and itinerant humans. The program leans into the region’s occult, mythology, and notions of fluidity in an attempt to return the mind to local conceptions of space where demons, deities, nature, humans, and animals roam in interrelated realms. Using haunting as a medium and local fishing gears as architectural precedents, “House on the Side of the Mekong” aims to bring within view (hi)stories that previously remained at the margins.