Le Corbusier on On Nut Road

A new city is being built atop the old. It erupts from the old city at odd points, on streets near busy metro stops, along the radial highways that cross the canals, seemingly ignorant of all previous geographies.

I find myself, one night, on a bridge over a canal in On Nut, where, not long ago, the traffic and the concrete gave way to the rice paddies and orchards. All around are the sounds and sights of construction, of 2x4s being nailed into place, of fresh caterpillar tracks in the red clay soil, of cascades of sparks coming off of welding torches on steel armatures, of fluorescent lights left on in unpainted hallways, illuminating gray drywall and plastic sawhorses.

Signs are going up. Condos for sale, plus a “community mall”-- a ubiquitous Bangkok feature, a self-conscious imitation of Southern California planning with all the spas and modern Japanese restaurants one would expect. Artists' renderings show manicured hedges, smartly dressed diners, joggers somehow blithely ignorant of the fanged Thai sun.

And yet cross the road, and find yourself in a fully unreconstructed city, a hodgepodge of spontaneous construction-- market sellers of grilled pork skewers and greenish oranges, shophouses occupied by dental clinics and hairdressers, broken concrete, stray dogs, old wooden houses starting to tilt alongside an ancient canal, A supermarket with stalls selling cheap clothes, knockoff jewelry, herbal soaps, butchered squid splayed out across rapidly melting ice.

In 1922, Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect who had the gall to turn himself into a pseudonymous brand decades before Cher, planned out his Ville Contemporaine, a planned city of 3,000,000 souls that was designed to reflect his own authoritarian vision for what a city should be. Preaching the gospel of architectural determinism, he saw the perfection of man in the perfection of architecture-- which, fortunately, was a task Le Corbusier felt he'd more or less accomplished in the form of “towers in the park.”

But unlike a great many of his colleagues, Le Corbusier was able to merrily shoehorn his vision into multiple political ideologies. A handmaiden of wealthy European industrialists, he designed their country estates and lobbied them to build worker housing along his lines, but who also spent a few years as the favored architect of the USSR, and who willingly carried out the architectural vision of the collaborationist government in France in World War II, who afterwards lent his vision to the construction of vaguely democratic-socialist megaprojects in an idealistic, newly independent India.

After cycling through industrial capitalism, communism, fascism, and social democracy, the tower in the park can thus take the form of post-industrial capitalism, as it did in the years following World War II, became emblematic of large-scale corporate architecture, both in high-density housing complexes and in suburban office parks.

And so On Nut is increasingly filled with the towers, as assets for the city's investing classes, leased out to more housing-transient populations-- young professionals, university students from wealthy families, expatriates looking for an environment that could just as easily fit into Dallas or Sydney. As the new city grows in size and influence, one wonders what will happen to the old. Will it be replaced, or will it grow in size accordingly, as a belt of poverty supplying the necessary labor to feed the tastes of those in the towers? And how much of it will be preserved as a nostalgic relic, an easily marketable counterpoint in a vertical city? After all, even Le Corbusier spent his final years in a rustic cabin by the sea.

The new Bangkok seems to grow and grow without reason, and one wonders where all the capital comes from. Ads appear for more and more condos, in further and further neighborhoods, with invitations to buy units off of the plan before ground is broken. The city takes on the character of a mirage, and it seems as if the act of construction takes primacy over the place itself. I'm reminded, at last, on that bridge over the canal, of Italo Calvino's Thekla, from Invisible Cities.

“Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask 'Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?' the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer 'So that its destruction cannot begin.' And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, 'Not only the city.'”