My current research project investigates the chronopolitics and temporal entanglements of modern architecture and the pre-modern built environment in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. It traces the histoires croisées of the region’s architectural and epigraphical fragments from the pre-colonial past into the present. The book argues that although architectural modernity is typically narrated as a new conception of time rooted in the present, modernism in Southeast Asia was also oriented toward “medieval” and “classical” pasts. This argument necessitates an investigation into what these temporal categories, imported from European historiography in the 19th and 20th centuries, meant in the context of the Southeast Asian built environment and how the colonial deployment of the concept of renaissance squared against local understandings of karma, rebirth, and sovereignty. It also demands related questions about the reorganization of the building trades in Southeast Asia and the transition from state-building projects as forms of world-making in the pre-colonial period to the professionalization of architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries. This development relied on the transregional circulation of labor, the implementation of architecture as a handmaiden of 19th-century colonialism and later 20th-century nationalism, and the modern encounter between autochthonous, migrant, and imperial cultures.