Bangkok Utopia: Modern Architecture and Buddhist Felicities, 1910–1973

Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia's Architecture

by Lawrence Chua

“Utopia” is a word not often associated with the city of Bangkok, which is better known for its disorderly sprawl, overburdened roads, and stifling levels of pollution. Yet as early as 1782, when the city was officially founded on the banks of the Chao Phraya river as the home of the Chakri dynasty, its orientation was based on material and rhetorical considerations that alluded to ideal times and spaces. The construction of palaces, monastic complexes, walls, forts, and canals created a defensive network while symbolically locating the terrestrial realm of the king within the Theravada Buddhist cosmos. Into the twentieth century, pictorial, narrative, and built representations of utopia were critical to Bangkok’s transformation into a national capital and commercial entrepôt. But as older representations of the universe encountered modern architecture, building technologies, and urban planning, new images of an ideal society attempted to reconcile urban-based understandings of Buddhist liberation and felicitous states like nirvana with worldly models of political community like the nation-state.

Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations of utopia that developed in the city—as expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals—from its first general strike of migrant laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of antinomy—one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities, but also to support conflicting world views within the urban landscape.

By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities.

442 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 28, 2021

Reviews

[Mika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Straight-up my favorite monograph on urban planning and modern architecture ever. Chua is playful in his writing, and he presents a clear, legible narrative on the development of Bangkok. He tackles many different buildings such as the crematorium or the cinema as exercises of state power and vehicles of national imaginings. The book emphasizes that Bangkok was shaped not by the colonial forces that influenced other modernist cities (like Brasilia, Bombay, Algiers, etc.) but by the trends of the global, capitalistic market. Chua ends with this: "The ruins of sri ariya suggest that architecture’s potential for enacting social change may not necessarily lie in building a better world but in demolishing the totalizing stranglehold late-stage capitalism places on the speculative imagination." (196) Thus, he offers that perhaps architects seeking to change the world shouldn't only build... they should un-build, they should destroy and remake anew. This is exactly the type of radical, exciting dimension of architecture I want to read about. Extra excited because I actually get to meet Chua in 3 weeks!!