Bangkok Utopia

Bangkok Utopia PDF Author: Lawrence Chua
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824887735
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
“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. Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations of utopia that developed in the city—as expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals—from its first general strike of migrant laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of antinomy—one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities, but also to support conflicting world views within the urban landscape. By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities.

Bangkok Utopia

Bangkok Utopia PDF Author: Lawrence Chua
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824887735
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
“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. Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations of utopia that developed in the city—as expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals—from its first general strike of migrant laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of antinomy—one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities, but also to support conflicting world views within the urban landscape. By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities.

Bangkok Street Food

Bangkok Street Food PDF Author: Tom Vandenberghe
Publisher: Lannoo Publishers
ISBN: 9789401424400
Category : Bangkok (Thailand)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Food is one of the reasons many tourists visit Thailand each year, not only for its affordability, but because the Kingdom's exotic cuisine offers an unrivaled culinary experience and is internationally famous for its distinctive flavours. The diversity, abundance and quality of ingredients are incomparable with any other country in the world. Bangkok Street Food provides you with all the best addresses in Bangkok as well as more than 60 authentic street food recipes. As you open the volume, you can smell coconut milk, coriander and lemon grass. Besides the appetizing recipes, it explains everything you need to know on cooking techniques and products.

Bangkok

Bangkok PDF Author: Marc Askew
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134659865
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bangkok is one of Asia's most interesting, varied, controversial and challenging cities. It is a city of contradictions, both in its present and past. This unique book examines the development of the city from its earliest days as the seat of the Thai monarchy to its current position as an infamous contemporary metropolis. Adopting insights from anthropology, urban studies and human geography, this is a powerful account of the city and its dynamic spaces. Marc Askew examines the city's variety from the inner-city slums to the rural-urban fringe, and gives us a keen insight into the daily life of the city's inhabitants, be they middle-class suburbanites or sex workers.

Bangkok

Bangkok PDF Author: Marc Askew
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134659857
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bangkok is one of Asia's most interesting, varied, controversial and challenging cities. It is a city of contradictions, both in its present and past. This unique book examines the development of the city from its earliest days as the seat of the Thai monarchy to its current position as an infamous contemporary metropolis. Adopting insights from anthropology, urban studies and human geography, this is a powerful account of the city and its dynamic spaces. Marc Askew examines the city's variety from the inner-city slums to the rural-urban fringe, and gives us a keen insight into the daily life of the city's inhabitants, be they middle-class suburbanites or sex workers.

Bangkok Wakes to Rain

Bangkok Wakes to Rain PDF Author: Pitchaya Sudbanthad
Publisher:
ISBN: 0525534768
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A post-war society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting the course of her future. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. Not long after, a young woman gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the post-submergence Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged, ruined landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself"--Provided by publisher.

22 Walks in Bangkok

22 Walks in Bangkok PDF Author: Kenneth Barrett
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462913806
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description
ING_08 Review quote

King of Bangkok

King of Bangkok PDF Author: Claudio Sopranzetti
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487526415
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Based on a decade of interviews and archival research, the English translation of this bestselling graphic novel tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets in Bangkok, as he decides to leave the urban capital and return to his native village. ... With each ticket he sells, he encounters something that brings him back to a period of his life, from his arrival in Bangkok all the way to the Red Shirt protests of 2010. Through an alternation of reflections on contemporary Bangkok and flashbacks to his past, we reconstruct Nok's story, the love story with his wife Gai, and the ups and downs of their migrant lives, as well as those of an entire country around them"--

Bangkok

Bangkok PDF Author: Leela Punyaratabandhu
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 0399578315
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book Here

Book Description
From one of the most respected authorities on Thai cooking comes this beautiful and deeply personal ode to Bangkok, the top-ranked travel destination in the world. WINNER OF THE ART OF EATING PRIZE Every year, more than 16 million visitors flock to Thailand’s capital city, and leave transfixed by the vibrant culture and unforgettable food they encounter along the way. Thai cuisine is more popular today than ever, yet there is no book that chronicles the real food that Thai people eat every day—until now. In Bangkok, award-winning author Leela Punyaratabandhu offers 120 recipes that capture the true spirit of the city—from heirloom family dishes to restaurant classics to everyday street eats to modern cosmopolitan fare. Beautiful food and location photography will make this a must-have keepsake for any reader who has fallen under Bangkok’s spell.

Woman, Man, Bangkok

Woman, Man, Bangkok PDF Author: Scot Barmé
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742501577
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the early decades of the twentieth century, Thailand's capital, Bangkok, took on an increasingly cosmopolitan character-a development fueled both by global economic forces and a local revolution in communications. The 1920s were a particularly dynamic period of social and cultural transformation that had a profound impact on the development of Thai modernity. This book examines the growth of a polyphonous and often vociferous Thai public, a public that used a range of new media outlets to express themselves and clamor for a more just and equitable social order. Scot BarmZ mines a rich lode of previously ignored cultural ephemera found in popular newspapers, magazines, novels, short stories, film booklets, and cartoons to create a vibrant cultural history of early modern Thailand that moves beyond conventional, elite-based historical studies of the period. By focusing on such controversies and conflicts as the status of women, relations between the sexes, class antagonisms, and the growth of a commercial mass culture, this book offers a new interpretation of the key decade of the 1920s and its significance for contemporary Thailand.

Bangkok Days

Bangkok Days PDF Author: Lawrence Osborne
Publisher: North Point Press
ISBN: 1429957328
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
A PASSIONATE, AFFECTIONATE RECORD OF ADVENTURES AND MISADVENTURES IN THE WORLD'S HOTTEST METROPOLIS Tourists come to Bangkok for many reasons—a sex change operation, a night with two prostitutes dressed as nuns, a stay in a luxury hotel. Lawrence Osborne comes for the cheap dentistry. Broke (but no longer in pain), he finds that he can live in Bangkok on a few dollars a day. And so the restless exile stays. Osborne's is a visceral experience of Bangkok, whether he's wandering the canals that fill the old city; dining at the No Hands Restaurant, where his waitress feeds him like a baby; or launching his own notably unsuccessful career as a gigolo. A guide without inhibitions, Osborne takes us to a feverish place where a strange blend of ancient Buddhist practice and new sexual mores has created a version of modernity only superficially indebted to the West. Bangkok Days is a love letter to the city that revived Osborne's faith in adventure and the world.