Kulapat Yantrasast: On Architecture for Art

Join Kulapat Yantrasast, Founder and Creative Director of WHY Architecture, for a lecture on his architectural practice, with a special focus on spaces for contemporary art, such as museums and art centres.

Kupalat Yantrasast is one of the leading global architects known for his interdisciplinary approach to space design. Yantrasast’s extensive career includes projects for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Musée du Louvre in Paris, and Christie’s. His most recent work includes the grandiose ILMI Science Discovery & Innovation Center in Riyadh as well as the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. He has been appointed the Artistic Director for Bukhara Biennial 2027. Kulapat was also recently named a 2026 Art Basel Medalist in the Cross-Disciplinary Creator category.

Kulapat Yantrasast will discuss WHY Architecture’s practice of designing culturally resonant and sustainable spaces for art, with a particular focus on the studio’s recent museum projects in Los Angeles — a city closely tied to Bill Viola's own life and career. The talk will reflect on how museum architecture can create meaningful, immersive environments for video and media art, and shape or amplify viewer experience.

The event will take place in English, with simultaneous translation into Kazakh and Russian.

Short biography:

Kulapat Yantrasast is the first architect to receive the Silpathorn Award from the Government of Thailand and an active advocate for support of the arts in society, serving on the Artists' Committee of Americans for the Arts. 

Born in Bangkok, Kulapat Yantrasast earned his master's and doctorate degrees in architecture from the University of Tokyo, and spent eight years working closely with Pritzker Prize–winning architect Tadao Ando on major cultural projects in the United States and Europe, including the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. 

Since then, Yantrasast and WHY have designed genre-defying spaces for some of the world's foremost cultural institutions, inspired by the architect’s passion for food, ecology, and human society. Kulapat Yantrasast believes that such a multifaceted approach to architecture connects cultures, discourse, and people – the philosophical backbone of every space he creates.