Traditional Thai Temples Coexist With a ‘Robot’ Skyscraper : East and West Collide in Bangkok Architecture

In Bangkok’s restrained world of the arts, a debate over public architecture shows signs of becoming an intellectual alley fight.

The Thai capital, one critic declared, has become a “paradise for ‘pastichers.’ ” Mentioned most often are a proliferation of Greek columns, Gothic facades and Bavarian lodges in tropical Bangkok.

“If this goes on, we’ll become a Disneyland, a laughingstock,” Krisda Arunvongse, an architect and professor, warned recently.

Vimolsiddhi Horayangkura, also an architect and academic, said: “I think Bangkok has the ‘architecture identity disaster syndrome.’ AIDS is epidemic here.”

In speeches, seminars and newspaper interviews, even over dim sum lunches, the debate rises sporadically, often becoming a bit testy for the normally courteous Thai professionals. The headquarters of the Bank of Asia, a 20-story building shaped like a robot, would be lucky to get a beep in edgewise.

Its architect, the articulate and adventurous Sumet Jumsai, laid out the basic controversy in a speech explaining why he designed the robot, which stares across a changing Bangkok with lidded, unblinking eyes, its antenna erect, a large but lovable R2D2.

“Present-day classical revivalism, which is the main branch of the so-called Post Modernism,” Sumet said, “represents the state of the art--an intellectual bankruptcy and a cultural cul-de-sac--in the West.

“It is a protest movement against the puritanical Modern Movement, and the bland International style in architecture. It advocates a new freedom in design, which means that, henceforth, anything goes.

‘Historical Repertoire’

“This in itself is refreshing, and there have been some very refreshing projects as a result. But it is a protest movement that seeks to replace without offering replacement, and in the ensuing dilemma it enlists the support of the historical repertoire: Greek, Roman, Gothic and Romantic. . . . “

In Bangkok, classical revivalism has become “a catalogue of meaningless architectural motifs which suits both the architects who dupe and the clients who are duped into the make-believe world of the nouveaux riches ,” Sumet said, without naming names. “It is the epitome of materialism and commercialism.”

That Western architectural revivalism should be practiced and debated in Bangkok raises another issue. Many voices here lament that the beauty of historic Thai architecture has already been buried under the International-style commercial buildings in this city of 6 million people.

Others question whether Thai classicism can be adapted to large modern buildings without inviting a grotesque stretching of the style, any more than a Southern California architect might create a 40-story office block in the Spanish mission style.

Many have tried here, but beyond picking up a decorative motif, no one has been able to transform the Thai temple--a narrow block with a high-pitched, tiled roof--into an office building.

“I have been trying for 30 years,” Krisda, an American-trained architect, said. “It’s very, very hard.”

He said three stories is the maximum height to which the traditional Thai style might be extended.

In separate interviews at their Bangkok offices, Sumet, Krisda and a third architect and professor, Rangsan Torsuwan, discussed their ideas and trends in Bangkok architecture. Each represents a segment of the debate. Rangsan is perhaps Bangkok’s hottest architect and professionally among its most controversial. He is the transmitter of a lot of things that make his colleagues itch.

Take Greek columns. At Amarin Plaza, an enclosed shopping mall, Rangsan used fluted classic columns to separate exterior show windows. Above the shops runs an ersatz classic frieze, screening four floors of parking. Atop it all sits a glass office structure.

Wall Street Tower, a Rangsan-designed office building, features two huge columns stretching eight stories to a vaulted entryway. While artistically debatable, the columns are awesome.

The jovial Rangsan does not defend all his buildings as personal artistic statements.

‘Give Him Funny Things’

“If the buyer wants funny things, you have to give him funny things,” he said.

Wealthy Thai home buyers explain their situation this way, according to Rangsan: “I have to take care of my business. You just give my wife what she wants in a house.”

Why do Thai wives want to live in Roman villas and Gothic townhouses? There was a period of European building here late in the last century, introduced by King Chulalongkorn. It is part of Thai culture, the architect said.

Krisda, a longtime first-rank architect in Bangkok, deplores what he calls copy-cat architecture.

“Architects whose commercial concerns are greater than their aesthetic ones are irresponsible,” he said. “Serious architects do not think of their work as fashion.”

His approach is to “try my best to keep my client from suggesting what his building should look like.”

Krisda said that at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--he and Rangsan studied there--his professors convinced him of the non-monetary reward of an architect’s life: “You like to see your work up there where you can point it out.”

Still, Krisda, who has designed some of the landmark buildings of Bangkok’s two decades of economic expansion, admits that the client ultimately calls the shots.

“You just can’t go directly against the big shots,” he said. “They’re surrounded by yes-men, used to getting their way. They are the elephant and we are the monkey. We have to think what is required to move the elephant. We wiggle a little sugar cane in front of them, get their attention, and then move back till they get where we want them to go.”

Generally, he said, the industrialist does not want a building that is a copy of a peer’s.

“For that they can hire a draftsman,” he said. “They come to you because they like your style.”

Rangsan, Krisda and Sumet all watch developments in architecture outside Thailand, including Los Angeles buildings. Sumet, in discussing what he calls “punk” architecture, mentioned specifically the work of Frank O. Gehry. His “punk,” which Sumet called “junkyard bits and pieces,” served to break some bonds. “But you can’t go on protesting forever,” the Bangkok architect said.

The man who gave architecture its first robot building--”user friendly,” according to its designer, and a joy to those who see it here--views the structure as signaling an end to revivalist Post Modernism, punk architecture and high-tech architecture. High-tech, exemplified by the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank headquarters in Hong Kong, celebrates the technology of a building by turning it inside out, displaying the works.

The robot building, Sumet says, has exorcised the machine as an entity to be worshiped.