The competition brings attention to the spaces along the borders of the 10 ASEAN nations, with the aim of improving their existing conditions. While there has been much discussion about achieving a “borderless” condition through economic and legislative initiatives, currently, the actual border spaces themselves have been neglected and are lagging behind these developments. Following the Mekong, at the border between Laos and Cambodia where the ground is flat, the river branches out loosing part of his speed and creating few smaller flows. On the east side of them there are two villages, one lao (in the Muang Khong region) and one cambodian (in the Strung Treng region). The villages are both depending on the Mekong and they have a similar life but they are facing each other on their own side of the border.

The main issues of this area are the pollution of the Mekong and the absence of an identified border.

• The Mekong shows an unicum for its particular situation: it has a continuous changing variety of ecosystems (every year the biologists discover hundreds of new animal species), but at the same time it suffers the effects of a wrong anthropization of his waters (industrial pollution, chemical contamination, unregulated fishing, increasing number of dams, etc.).
• Thinking about the border our question was Which border? Looking from above we discovered that there is nothing that physically marks the limit between the two countries and this highlights the concept that a border is just a conventional division of the same territory. As an evidence of it we found two different borders (representation of Google maps and Bing maps) with a distance of hundreds meters in between.

Our philosophy is to re-interpretate the border itself: our border is not a division between two elements but a third element with its own qualities. Instead of separating the communities it brings them closer. Reading the genius loci, imagining the everyday life of the villages and thinking about their culture and economy we propose an integrated self-sustaining system located on the border area.

This organic shape adapts itself to the morphology and the texture of the environment and presents three different functions and situations:

1. an amphibious park located in the water, where the boats can moor and people can walk on a floating plot which collects water plants that naturally filter the water.
2. a double system of paddy fields, irrigated by canals coming from the amphibious park, are cultivated by the villagers as they are used to do.
3. heart of the project is a 0 km market where people could arrive (both from ground or river and both from Cambodia or Laos), meet each other, sell and buy their self-made products.

The size of the project is solved in detail with the lightness of the used materials (recycled tires for the floating paths and fabrics for the roofing of the market). This strategy does not nullify the immediate surrounding but contributes and fortifies the environment in terms of sustainability and social co-operation.