Modernity’s Other (original) (raw)
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Historiographical Questions in Southeast Asia's Modern Architecture
Southeast Asia's Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power, 2019
What is the modern in Southeast Asia’s architecture and how do we approach its study critically? This pathbreaking multidisciplinary volume is the first critical survey of Southeast Asia’s modern architecture. It looks at the challenges of studying this complex history through the conceptual frameworks of translation, epistemology and power. Challenging Eurocentric ideas and architectural nomenclature, the authors examine the development of modern architecture in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, with a focus on selective translation and strategic appropriation of imported ideas and practices by local architects and builders. The book transforms our understandings of the region’s modern architecture by moving beyond a consideration of architecture as an aesthetic artefact and instead examining its entanglement with different dynamics of power. “This collection opens the existing field up and will enrich specialists’ way of seeing. It shows how ‘modern architecture’ could be differently understood, challenged, transformed and owned. It capably represents a break, but not a retreat from influential architectural history and theory. The aim is to not merely moving beyond the comfortable limit of dominant architectural approach, to retrieve neglected categories, the sense of otherness, and zones of ignorance, but to show how they are constitutive parts of the discipline. The volume is enriching for it challenges without ignoring the establishment.” – Abidin Kusno, University of British Columbia “A provocative collection of essays that challenge both colonial epistemologies and nationalist constructs traditionally employed in analyzing modern architectures, landscapes and spatial practices of Southeast Asia; fresh ‘home scholarship’ from authors deeply engaged with the region at the same time that they critically re-construct that ‘regionality’ in terms of cross-cultural flows, knowledge production and politics; a most welcome addition to critical spatial histories of the ‘non-West’.” – Sibel Bozdogan, Boston University ISBN 978-981-47-2278-0 (paperback)
Proceedings of the 6th East Asian Architectural Culture International Conference, 2011
This paper presents analytical and critical inquiries on the Victory Monument--known in Thai as Anusawari Chai Samoraphum --in Bangkok, Thailand, with respect to its symbolic roles on power mediation for the state, together with the identification of “Self,” known as khwampenthai or Thainess, and the formation of the Thais’ perception about “Other” towards the neighboring peoples in Southeast Asia. Through examinations on political and historical contexts, the research argues that the design along with meanings of Anusawari Chai Samoraphum have been crafted, re-appropriated, and revised by the ruling authorities in modern Thailand to serve their political agendum--particularly the pursues of colonial ambitions and interests in Indochina by military means--thus lending legitimacy for their regimes under the ideological pretexts of nationalism, anti-colonialism, and democracy. With the ongoing globalization phenomenon, all countries in Southeast Asia today are working towards the integration into a unified community. While the assimilating and global repositioning processes have become principal tasks for nations across the region, the issues of managing and promoting cultural diversity are in fact equally important and deserve more attentions from scholars. Accordingly, this paper--via discussions on the Victory Monument by employing the discourse of Thainess as a mode of problematization--also intend to: 1) advance mutual understandings among the residents of Suvarnabhumi by revealing how architecture and urban space have been manipulated to serve politics, as well as how politics has influenced the creations and significations of the built environment; and 2) investigate the mechanism in cultural dynamics that has been reinterpreted and used to represent something other than itself, such as nationalistic ideology and national identity, apart from generating debates on its repercussions.
The Aesthetics of Power: Architecture, Identity, and Modernity from Siam to Thailand
White Lotus Press: Studies in Contemporary Thailand Series No. 19, 2013
The Aesthetics of Power : Architecture, Identity and Modernity from Siam to Thailand comprehensively examines the politics of representation in architecture and urban space from the 1850s to the present time. By utilizing the built environment as a mode of problematization for studying the Thai national and cultural identity ̶̶ ̶̶ known as Thainess or khwampenthai ̶̶ ̶̶ this book offers a broader discourse and generates debate on the political forms of architecture as well as on the architectural forms of politics. Divided into seven chapters with more than 150 illustrations, it investigates a number of buildings and public spaces that signify various types of power and function in terms of media par excellence for the constructions of khwampenthei. Encompassing many palatial, government, public, and commercial structures, the inquiries also incorporate the ways in which these built forms have been subversively resemanticized by several contesting social agents to achieve their political objectives. An innovative synthesis of architectural history and critical studies on contemporary Thailand, the book not only brings a fresh understanding of complex Thai society but illustrates how Thais have appropriated modernity together with Western material culture in creating and transforming their modern identity.
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Docomomo Journal, n. 57 – Modern Southeast Asia
TOSTOES, Ana; FERREIRA, Zara (ed.), Setiadi Sopandi, Yoshiyuki Yamana, Johannes Widodo, Shin Muramatsu (guest-ed.), Docomomo Journal, 57 - Modern Southeast Asia, Lisbon, Docomomo International, 2017