TRACING SAND
An unsettling question has been growing on us: what does it mean to build today? If architecture is less an object than a temporary constellation of relations, how does the built environment mobilise, perpetuate or reconfigure networks already in motion—supply chains, regulations, labour, ecologies?
We turned this question to sand—the most elemental material of modern life. Sand forms the basis of concrete, glass, and asphalt, the substrate of cities and infrastructures; and silica, its mineral component, is the foundation of solar panels and silicon chips—the backbone of energy transitions and digital technologies. Yet sand is never inert. In nature, it circulates with water, coursing through rivers, deltas, and coasts, sustaining aquatic ecologies and human livelihoods. When this circulation is interrupted—by dams, dredging, reclamation, or extraction—rivers starve, and landscapes unravel. To trace sand, then, is to trace relations—between geology and labour, infrastructure and desire, territory and imagination.
We have been following sand and water in Southeast Asia, tracing their movements through the Mekong River Basin—from its headwaters on the Tibetan Plateau, through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and, by extension, through resource extraction, to Singapore. Over the years, this fieldwork has become less a project than a way of life.
This journey is, for us, a pilgrimage of the recovering architect—an attempt to unbuild the built environment by attending to its substrata. To unbuild is to reveal how a site comes into being: through materials extracted, energies consumed, and imaginaries sustained. Drifting with the currents of people, sediment, and power, we have come to believe that planetary interconnectedness is not an abstraction, but something that can be sensed, embodied, and lived.
Singapore Biennale 2025: Pure Intention
How Much Wattage Is One Handbreadth Of Water? Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, 2025
Water Campaign: Clean drinking water for indigenous children in Thailand’s Vajiralongkorn Dam Reservoir
KoozArch interview: Ripple, Traces, Drifts: Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan on process-oriented practice, 2025
Essay, ‘Hydroelectric Sensibility’, in 100 Words for Water: A Projective Ecosocial Vocabulary, 2025
Conversation with Lucia Pietroiusti, ‘Walking into the black box with a flashlight’, in Swamplands Reader, 2025
CREDITSImages by Chen Zhan and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This ongoing work is supported by the Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize and the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s CCA-Mellon multidisciplinary research programme.
We are deeply grateful for our collaborators and friends in the field: PuPla Trikaewprasert, Linh Le, Darius Sadighi, Vy Trịnh, Duc Le, Pen Sereypagan, Lyna Kourn, Dorothy Tang, Andrea Goh, Chee Kien Seah, and many more.