Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bangkok Utopia: Modern Architecture and Buddhist Felicities, 1910-1973

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

Chua, Lawrence
Knapp, Ronald G.
Ruan, Xing

Hardcover

Series: Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia's Architecture

General ArchitectureSoutheast Asian History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0824884604
ISBN13: 9780824884604
Publisher: Univ Of Hawaii Pr
Published: Feb 28 2021
Pages: 296
Weight: 2.10
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.90 Depth: 10.10
Language: English

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.

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