Chiangmai Life Architects

Chiangmai Life Architects (CLA) designs and Chiangmai Life Construction (CLC) builds modern, organic, "green" buildings that are functional and of high quality.

The company's philosophy is to integrate natural materials, mainly bamboo and clay into mainstream architecture by showing that they can be designed to the needs of the 21st century individual and functionally can compete with common construction materials such as steel and concrete. Our designs are influenced by modern architecture as well as traditional designs from all over the world, and we strongly believe that state of the art engineering knowledge is essential to a more common use of these materials especially in larger scale architecture.

We see that the main inhibition for natural materials to be accepted as mainstream construction materials, is mainly the perception of the audience that they are poor people's or antiquated materials. In our experience the use of these materials has been limited by human ignorance of the designer and builder rather than by an inherent weakness in the materials' characteristics themselves. We have only just scratched the surface of their potential.

CLC was founded in 2010 by Markus Roselieb an Austrian self-taught architect during the construction of Panyaden School, which won several awards. Tosapon Sittiwong, a young architect from northern Thailand joined in 2013. Since then the company has specialized in modern earth and bamboo architecture and built several buildings that have gained international recognition like the Erber Research Center which was selected as finalist at the 2015 World Architecture Festival and Trika Villa which was awarded the Chiangmai Design Award for Architecture and has been extensively published in over 10 languages in architectural books and websites all over the world.