Kotchakorn Voraakhom is a Thai landscape architect who works on a city that is sinking. Bangkok sits about a metre and a half above sea level, and her practice Landprocess designs public ground that is engineered to flood on purpose rather than to shed water into an overwhelmed drainage system. She read landscape architecture at Chulalongkorn University, took a graduate degree at Harvard, co-founded the community design non-profit Kounkuey Design Initiative, and returned to Bangkok in 2006; she has taught at Chulalongkorn since 2010 and founded the Porous City Network in 2017. Her built work — the Chulalongkorn Centenary Park, the rooftop farm at Thammasat University, the Chong Nonsi canal park — treats retention volume as the primary design material, drawing on the Thai kaem ling or "monkey cheeks" model of holding runoff for later use.
