All(zone) is one of the most interesting contemporary architecture firms in Southeast Asia. The founders of the office, based in Bangkok, describe themselves as “a group of happy professionals (…) always captured by contemporary vernacular solutions”. Their latest realization is indeed contemporary and vernacular, as well as embedded with a certain happiness, or at least a tranquil serenity,

Recently completed in an industrial area of the capital of Thailand, the new Duriflex Warehouse is a storage space, but more importantly a display and sales area open to the public. Here, all(zone) largely draws from the vernacolo of the architecture of logistics, which is subject to the bare necessary changes to adapt it to the needs of a contemporary representative building.

In plan, the regular grid of pillars features a single exception, a diagonal line which in three dimensions transforms in a metallic grid screen. Within the virtually equipotential internal space, this element delimits different fields, the entrance on the one side and the actual warehouse on the other, while also accompanying the staircase leading to the upper floor.

Furthermore, the observation of a section reveals the specificities of the two barrel vaults, which are anything but ordinary: they are asymmetrical, the largest is really monumental in its size, and both are extremely thin, made of a single sheet of metal, folded in different directions to increase its firmness. This material, also stretching on all elevations, is the most relevant element of the Duriflex Warehouse in terms of language: from the outside and from the inside, the building’s envelope is perceived as a single-material, vibrant, nearly optical surface.

A bearing beam overhangs from the main façade and a sacred log, worshipped by Duriflex workers, seemingly supports it. But this is just an illusion: contemporary architecture sustains the totem, it firmly holds it, and it engages with it in a semi-serious dialogue between ancient symbolisms and contemporary abstractions.