On Pastiche

Every city has at least two faces. One face is the city as it appears to the walker in the street. The other is the city as it is seen as a whole.

From the pedestrian's view, Bangkok is a tangle, a wonderfully complex maze of side streets and markets, canals and footbridges, artisans' shops and wooden houses. It is a massive city of small-scale neighborhoods.

But from a taxi speeding along the Don Mueang Expressway an entirely different Bangkok is revealed. It becomes so obviously flat, constructed on a baking plain near the mouth of the Chao Phraya River. It is a flatness that only deltas can have, and as such it fits the same topographic profile as Venice, Alexandria, and New Orleans. The skyscrapers are the induced delusion of verticality in an estuarine city.

And from this vantage, the city becomes a horror. The endless flatness is punctuated here and there by cheaply built apartment blocks, painted egg-yolk yellow and swimming pool-tile blue, the residents' laundry hanging from balconies, window frames rusted. And from every angle, unbelievably high electric pylons march diagonally across the landscape, before becoming obscured in the smog-hazed distance.

The same back alleys that strike the walker as so full of life-- corner stores and kids playing football in the street, groups of middle-aged men idling their way through the Sunday afternoon over a case of beer-- are revealed as dusty, cinder-block canyons of identical shophouses, planned in vast, oblong developments delineated by plastic-choked canals that have long since ceased to irrigate the rice fields.

It is Brasilia in reverse. In the absence of grand-scale modernist planning, we have a city that, while often lovable and homey on the ground, is an amoebic blob from the bird's eye. Even the Buddhist temples, contributors of rooflines that give Bangkok an exoticism to the Western tourist, reveal their sameness. The constantly repeated three-tiered red roofs remind me of nothing more than a thousand Pizza Huts.

The concrete apartment blocks, the squat office buildings, the carbon-copy townhouses might be ugly, sure, but at least they are functional. I don't find them bothersome per se. What are truly contemptible are the countless, manifold attempts at imitation, especially the wholesale copying of historic Western architectural styles.

You see every piece of pastiche nightmare, again, from the freeway. The cityscape bristles with primary-colored mansard roofs, with concrete arches that attempt to replicate Tuscany or Provence, the chintzy Mediterranean villa McMansions of the gated communities of the north suburbs, the velvety baroque sleaze of the towering bordellos on Ratchadaphisek Road, the cast-off Roman colonnades and Ionic capitals, the faux-brick imitations of London dockyards, the toy windmills and aluminum red barns stolen from the set of Green Acres. Robert Venturi and his giggling, self-fellating architectural compatriots suggested that we "learn from Las Vegas." In an absolute and willful ignorance of cultural, environmental, and utilitarian considerations, the commercial builders of Bangkok have learned with the diligence of Confucian scholars.

What might be equally horrifying is when Bangkok commercial architecture makes attempts to replicate past Thai forms with hyper-industrial materials. A particularly hideous and familiar example is found in the false rustic-brick fronts with simulated peeling paint at Asiatique. I'd also point to any number of steroidal rice barns-- complete with buffalo horns and rusted plows-- that serve as music venues.

Now one could argue that this sort of adaptation and imitation isn't new. Human behavior can probably be summed up as bricolage, and syncretic aesthetic sensibilities have developed all around the world. In Bangkok specifically, one can look at the shophouses of Chinatown, built with features adapted from the Portuguese. Or the Grand Palace, with its deeply Thai roofline grafted onto a Georgian structure.

But those old buildings were built to last. The new Bangkok commercial architecture looks painfully cheap and throw-away and plastic. The architectural detritus gives the metropolis the appearance of a toy city built by a massive toddler, easy to destroy and easy to replace.

It should be no surprise that these structures are deeply prone to the flooding and typhoons that mark the season cycle, and those built in the early '90s are already ravaged. Whitewashed cornices and concrete Cupids become streaked with acid rain, taking on the look of worn-down styrofoam stacked high, encasing greasy, sliding-sash windows. Inevitably, all of these buildings will crack like Playskool furniture left out in muddy front yards, sun-faded, leering over the surrounding belts of slums, saying nothing to the citizen-observer quite so much as "fuck you, Bangkok."

Art historians, have, over the course of the past couple of centuries, tended to smile at what we now regard as monstrosities, think of them as the kitschy artifacts of a more innocent era-- and maybe even find a strain of beauty in them. Despite my serious doubts about whether these structures will be so lucky, or even survive (think of all the imploded Vegas casinos), I have no power over what future observers will think of when they look out at the skyline of the new Bangkok. So I point my eyes forward, take a sip of my coffee, and do my best to laugh rather than despair.