Presenter: Lawrence Chua, PhD (Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Syracuse University / Visiting Research Scholar, CSEAS Kyoto University)
Title: Airconditioning and Sensuous Citizenship Formation in the Architecture of Early 20th-century Bangkok Cinema
Zoom Meeting ID: 822 2657 4799
Passcode: 724789
* During the event, please refrain from taking photos or recording videos from the presentation.
Language: English
Abstract: In 1931, King Prajadhipok (r. 1925–1935) made a last-ditch effort to stimulate popular support for the absolute monarchy by commissioning three public works to commemorate the 150-year anniversary of the founding of Bangkok; The three were sited within close proximity to one another: a bascule bridge that traversed the Chaophraya River, a memorial statue to the founder of the city and the Chakri dynasty, and a cinema, the Sala Chaloem Krung. While all these projects deployed materials and techniques of modernity in the public sphere, the Sala Chaloem Krung integrated both infrastructural and symbolic approaches. It brought together modern technologies like air-conditioning and materials like steel-reinforced concrete to produce a new kind of public space in which the experience of citizenship was manipulated through architectural design. This talk repositions the history of air-conditioning within the history of modern mass politics and public space. It integrates a reading of the “visible politics,” or architecture, with the invisible technologies that sustain it to better understand both air-conditioning’s role in the history of modern architecture and architecture’s role in the formation of a modern national identity.
Bio: Lawrence Chua is a historian of the modern built environment with a focus on the histories of transregional modern architecture and urban culture in Asia. He is currently an associate professor at the School of Architecture, Syracuse University. He has been a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, a Marie S. Curie fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and a fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden. He is the author of Bangkok Utopia: Modern Architecture and Buddhist felicities (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2021). He is co-editor of the book series ArchAsia: Histories and Futures of Asia’s Architecture, Urbanism, and Environments for Hong Kong University Press. With the artists Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer, he is a founding board member of Denniston Hill, a queer artist of color-led arts and social justice organization in upstate New York.
Event organizers: Satoru Kobayashi, Masaaki Okamoto (CSEAS), Hiroshi Aihara (Daikin Industries), Chika Yamada (CSEAS)
Contact: Chika Yamada chika128[at]cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp