Building Siam: Leisure, race, and nationalism in modern Thai architecture, 1910-1973

This dissertation examines the contingent development of leisure architecture, race, and nationalism in 20th-century Siam and Thailand (as the country was known after 1939). It argues that architecture is a political arrangement through which bodies experienced ideas about national belonging and community in lived space. By tracing the emergence of the architectural profession within the historical consolidation of racial divisions in the building trades and the displacement of the royal court by new urban classes as the primary consumers of leisure and entertainment, it demonstrates how the material aspects of the built environment acquired rhetorical characteristics. Throughout the 20th century, the architecture of cinemas, stadia, temple fairs, and other sites of leisure consumption was critical to the formation of an aesthetic form of politics that linked the fate of a race-centered national community with the welfare of the monarchy. From the first general strike of workers in Bangkok in 1910 until the construction of a cremation pyre for murdered demonstrators on the royal parade ground in 1973, architects, planners and their political patrons attempted to unite distinct geographical and cultural regions within a racialized national identity and make the monarchy appear modern by re-casting its symbolic forms in the new technologies and materials of the 20th century. As leisure pursuits became professionalized in the 20th century, specialized arenas for their performance developed outside of public spaces like the wat or monastic complex where they had traditionally occurred. These new arenas sought to replace the political possibilities of public gatherings like the labor rally with aesthetic spectacles like the boxing match. While the rally in the public square brought to the foreground class tensions and political differences within the national ranks, spectacles like the boxing match in the stadium underscored the culture common to all members of a Thai "race" by shaping a communal aesthetic vocabulary through the experience of its citizens.