Samsen Street Hotel
courtesy CHAT Architects Samsen Street Hotel

Bangkok Bastards.” That is what local architect Chat Chuenrudeemol calls the temporary-structures-turned-permanent, sheet metal additions, and peculiar hybrid building types that distinguish this city of more than 10 million people from other metropoles in Southeast Asia. He claims they have a particular character and exhibit local variations, even if such “soft architecture” (as opposed to the hard forms of permanent buildings) might exist almost everywhere in the world. He has dedicated a great deal of research to those peculiarities and found one particular type he was able to convert into the signal project of his still young design career: the sex motel.

Of the structure Chuenrudeemoi has written:“From the street, the structure appears like any other concrete frame infill building designed in the Late Modern era … Its defining characteristic is a small void at street level that allows guests to inconspicuously penetrate the building perimeter in the safety of their cars. From the street tunnel, guests find themselves in an open-air auto courtyard, lined with brightly colored curtained parking spots. A hotel attendant will quickly usher the car into an available parking spot, directly linked to a private 'love suite.' Once the car is securely parked, the curtain is pulled shut, giving the couple complete privacy to continue their romantic interlude.”

While the sparse aesthetic recalls the original Modernism of the concrete building, the mint green-painted scaffolding and a few touches of color in the rooms enlivens the structure in every nook with the dense life of the street all around it.
courtesy CHAT Architects
courtesy CHAT Architects
courtesy CHAT Architects

Asked to renovate one such motel, the Samsen Street Hotel, Chuenrudeemol turned the courtyard into a swimming pool and outdoor cinema. Not only can guests loll in the water watching the almost exclusively Thai films projected on the giant screen, but the architect also added a scaffolding structure on both the interior and the exterior walls that lets people sneak in and out of the rooms, while also providing outdoor seating perches on which to eat mango sticky rice and watch the movie.

courtesy CHAT Architects
Samsen Street Hotel
courtesy CHAT Architects Samsen Street Hotel
Original structure of Samsen Street Hotel
courtesy CHAT Architects Original structure of Samsen Street Hotel
Samsen Street Hotel modeling
W Workspace courtesy CHAT Architects Samsen Street Hotel modeling
Samsen Street Hotel modeling
W Workspace courtesy CHAT Architects Samsen Street Hotel modeling

The scaffolding is a permanent version of the additions Chuenrudeemol admires in the local vernacular, here embellished with a few arches and details that also recall verandas and other heat-shielding stalls. On the outer walls, the structure softens the hard edges of the building, while also forming a porous skin in which artists have been invited to create installations. At the base, it broadens out into a café and stalls for local food vendors—the client began his career as a shopkeeper and developer with just such a stall.

Samsen Street Hotel
courtesy CHAT Architects Samsen Street Hotel
Samsen Street Hotel
courtesy CHAT Architects Samsen Street Hotel

Chuenrudeemol continued the mix of funk and invented function on the inside by turning the rooms into an array of different types, ranging from “dormitories” that act as youth hostels with communal bathrooms, and private rooms with window seats that convert into extra beds, to luxurious hotel suites. While the sparse aesthetic recalls the original Modernism of the concrete building, the mint green-painted scaffolding and a few touches of color in the rooms enlivens the structure in every nook with the dense life of the street all around it.

Such attempts to preserve, update, and energize these forms that Bangkok has produced as a modern city—out of a combination of native traditions and building materials, colonial importations and their local interpretations, and now the forms that conform to global standards—are central to the work of a group of young architects working not only in Bangkok, but in Southeast Asian cities in general. This group inclues architects such as Danny Wicaksono of Studio Dasar and Agatha Carolina and Chrisye Octavani of Bitte of Jakarta and, in Vietnam, Tran Thi Ngu Ngon and Nguyen Hai Lono of Tropical Space, and Mai Lan Chi Obtulovicova, Nguyen Duc Trung, and Marek Obtulovic of ODDO Architects.

Breaking through the distinction between the mass of high-rises and shopping malls that are taking up more and more of the city, the preserved area around the royal palace, the various temples that dot the urban landscape, and the remaining fabric of housing and shops that retains the smaller scale, density, and seeming lack of order that is organized around the “Bangkok Bastards,” these architects seek to create new hybrids and bastards that will give such cities their own character.

Baan Rim Naam restaurant
Aaron Betsky Baan Rim Naam restaurant
Baan Rim Naam restaurant
Aaron Betsky Baan Rim Naam restaurant

Another such site of reuse and renovation is Baan Rim Naam, the small restaurant Austrian ex-pat architect Florian Gypser has started in a renovated warehouse along the shores of the Chao Phraya River. Almost impossible to find at the end of a labyrinth of alleyways and yet fully discovered by the local in-crowd, the restaurant is not much more than an open veranda that serves as the most public part of an ongoing renovation project in which Gypser has carved out a complex of furniture workshops and living spaces looking out towards the high-rises and shopping malls at the other side of the river.

A promising site for the next monument of this movement is the New World Mall. The ruin of a shopping mall near the backpacker heaven of Khao San Road, the structure opened in the early 1980s as an 11-story harbinger of modernity. The government, however, had only given permission for a four-story building, and proceeded to close the mall and remove the top seven stories. A fire then ripped off the construction protection, leaving the mall’s atrium exposed. It filled with water and became a breeding ground for mosquitoes. To combat those, local residents brought in fish, who thrived in the artificial pond. Soon entrepreneurs were catching and selling the tilapia as food, before the government again stepped in and culled the aquatic population, leaving an elegant array of koi in their stead.

New World Mall
New World Mall
New World Mall
New World Mall
Conceptual studies for New World Mall
courtesy Supermachine Studio Conceptual studies for New World Mall
Conceptual studies for New World Mall
courtesy Supermachine Studio Conceptual studies for New World Mall
Conceptual studies for New World Mall
courtesy Supermachine Studio Conceptual studies for New World Mall

New World has since become a site for occasional art events and installations, famous throughout the city as a place to explore, whether on permitted occasions or by sneaking through the rather porous fencing. Now another local architect, Pitupong Chaowakul of Supermachine Studio, is working on the commission to renovate New World by turning it into stores and restaurants, while maintaining and strengthening its status as an arts magnet. His plans call for preserving the pond and many of the ruinous elements of the building, including escalators covered with plants whose roots have collected soil in the treads and risers of the mechanism, while weaving more stable and commodious structures through the concrete framework.

To see architects such as these three Bangkok residents beginning to erect the scaffolding for new activities and inhabitation in the remains of many layers of construction, rather than just relying on new construction to create more air-conditioned objects reflecting the latest styles in exterior decoration, both here and elsewhere, is heartening. I hope that, as such forms develop, we can learn from the Bangkok Bastards how to bring our own vernacular back to life in a productive and beautiful manner.

The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.