Earlier this month, we had the chance to attend the 2026 version of Anthology, the ASEAN architectural competition, within the historic district of Intramuros in Manila.
This 12 months’s competition revolved across the theme Shared Floor, prompting discussions on the structure of care, tradition, and the collective way forward for Southeast Asia and past.
In keeping with competition founder and organiser William Ti Jnr: “Shared floor is a place that reframes structure as territorial accountability. The bottom turns into the stage upon which competing ambitions play out. Each constructing touches this floor, and each constructing alters it. A basement modifications groundwater conduct. A podium redirects pedestrian move. A masterplan restructures entry to gentle, air, and mobility.”
If we’re to use this notion to the apply of tourism on each regional and world ranges, the architectural idea of shared floor shifts the main target from creating remoted, luxurious vacation spot objects to designing interconnected environments that embrace the local people, ecosystem, and regional geography.
Ti truly factors out that structure doesn’t finish at a property line: moderately, it acknowledges that the bottom in Southeast Asia and the remainder of the larger continent is layered, productive, and ecological.
As such, shared floor essentially reshapes how locations are constructed, skilled, and built-in into the host nation.
What precisely does the idea of shared floor entail?
In a hyper-globalised area like Southeast Asia, environmental and financial impacts refuse to cease at nationwide borders.
With regard to the shared floor method, it recognises {that a} coastal intervention or infrastructure improvement in a single territory alters the move of capital, labour, and water methods in one other.
For tourism professionals, it’s a realisation that cross-border tourism corridors just like the Mekong sub-region have to be designed collectively.
A shared floor mentality ensures that constructing a cruise terminal or high-speed rail hyperlink considers regional provide chains and migratory realities, shifting the paradigm from nationwide competitors to regional ecosystem preservation.
Not fairly the tip of privatisation
The idea of exclusivity, particularly amongst mega-resorts, business enclaves, and gated mixed-use developments in Asia, have primarily sealed off native communities and prevented them from attaining the financial advantages of elevated commerce and foot visitors into the realm.
Whereas the idea of shared floor doesn’t essentially name for an finish to privatisation (and, doubtlessly, gentrification), the precept promotes porosity, primarily edges the place the bottom degree stays a democratic layer.
As an alternative of separating travellers from locals, designs encourage civic alternate and extra open interplay.
Developments created alongside these traces characteristic open, communal hubs, public pathways, and shared backyards that function collective areas the place vacationers and neighborhoods naturally work together over meals, recreation, and tradition.
One such improvement is Kernel Design’s The Floor Bangkok which was created as a dynamic neighborhood hub that helps life all through the day, accommodating a variety of customers and actions.
The place does environmental integration come into play in tourism structure and design?
Particularly now that the world is bearing the brunt of local weather change’s worst results, the floor in Asia is especially friable, particularly due to brutal drought alternating with heavier monsoon rains, super-typhoons, and tidal surges.
In gentle of those environmental challenges, structure acts as a type of territorial accountability moderately than a static visible assertion.
This has resulted in resorts whose basic infrastructure is handled as interventions inside residing ecological methods.
Corporations like WOHA Architects which has dealt with tasks like Alila Villas Uluwatu in Bali and the Pan Pacific Orchard in Singapore; in addition to VTN Architects in Vietnam prioritise mixing constructed kinds with topography, water retention grids, and native flora.
Of their designs, tourism buildings actively take part in local weather resilience as an alternative of changing into a further drain on native sources.
I had the chance to debate the matter with a senior Filipino inside designer who shared her ideas relating to environmental design in lodging and points of interest, and her concern includes making areas useful as shared floor moderately than merely aesthetic.
As she put it: “[In design,] the less complicated the higher. As an alternative of losing the area with crops, put benches in order that it will not be wasted. There must be bushes, not shrubs. Particularly in sure areas, some fruit-bearing bushes are popularly utilized in public areas. For instance, in Italy, alongside public walkways, you could have orange bushes which offer shade and people strolling by can choose the fruit; nothing is wasted. Areas, particularly inexperienced areas, should not be laborious to take care of after some time.”
What does shared floor imply for heritage websites?
We will say that the shared floor precept brings reduction, although not essentially serves as a panacea, to the consequences of speedy urbanisation and business tourism.
Too many individuals and ill-conceived improvement have traditionally led to the demolition of heritage websites throughout cities like Yangon, Jakarta, and Penang.
Making use of the precept of shared floor honours the historic layers embedded within the land, together with colonial grids, indigenous typologies, and sacred areas.
On the identical time, as an alternative of flattening regional id to assemble standardized fashionable services, the idea champions the adaptive reuse of cultural landscapes.
By filtering vernacular structure via modern design, it counters the commodification of native tradition, giving vacationers an genuine, deep sense of place rooted within the collective reminiscence of the host neighborhood.
