ARTICLES : THEMAGAZINE issue 11

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BANGKOK then & Now

In this five-part anniversary special, we look at how Bangkok has changed over the last few decades. Then we hazard a look into the future, speculating on what we might find when we get there. illustrations by thanawat chaweekallayakul

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mall matters Bangkok’s pleasure-domes are rising as others are falling.

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o find the blueprint for the self-enclosed Bangkok shopping mall, you need to travel far beyond this country’s shores – across oceans, deserts and mountain ranges – until you reach the unprepossessing city of Edina, Minnesota. Here, just south of downtown, sits the most distant relative of our retail behemoths. Today, the Southdale Centre might not look much – is just another grey concrete box, in just another Midwest American city. But its design by the Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen was a superlative-garnering hit when it opened in 1956 (“a pleasure-dome-with-parking” gushed Time) and it quickly spawned imitators.

The reason for the enthusiasm was simple. “Gruen had the idea of putting the whole complex under one roof,” wrote Malcom Gladwell in a 2004 profile of Victor for The New Yorker, “with airconditioning for the summer and heat for the winter. Almost every other major shopping centre had been built on a single level, which made for punishingly long walks.

Gruen put stores on two levels, connected by escalators and fed by two-tiered parking. In the middle he put a kind of town square, a garden court’ under a skylight, with a fishpond, enormous sculpted trees, a twenty-one-foot cage filled with bright-coloured birds, balconies with hanging plants, and a café.”

Sound familiar? It should. Today, every Bangkok mall is, like every mall just about everywhere, a variation on Gruen’s winning prototype: a fully enclosed, multi-tiered complex, usually anchored by one or two major department stores and with a garden court sitting under a skylight. But there is a twist in this tale. Ironically, many of ours veer closer, slightly, to Gruer’s grand plan. It was his hope that the Southdale would sit at the heart of a living, breathing community that included apartment buildings, schools, parks and medical centres. But it never came to be.

Instead, the Southdale sits, like so many suburban US malls, stranded amid acres of parking lot out on the fringes of town. Contrast that with here, where malls are found slap bang in the city centre, and often the integrated centerpiece in some dense, mixed-use development, and it

starts to become clear why ours are rising while many of America’s are dead or dying (visit www.deadmalls.com to see the slowlydecaying corpses). Bangkok’s malls aren’t anachronistic attempts to supplant Main Street – like them or loath them, they are Main Street. t is, of course, more complicated than that. There are many more reasons than their mere centrality why our malls are booming, not least Internet shopping, or rather the lack of it. In the West, e-commerce now accounts for a huge chunk of retail spending (6 percent in the US, 17 percent in South Korea and 12 percent in Japan) and, as a result, has negatively impacted commercial real estate, and helped lay waste to many traditionally mall-centred companies (Tower Records, HMV, etc). The same has yet to happen here, but that could change, and quickly. Currently only 1 percent of Thai retail spending is done online and this spending is often done using the primitive cash-on-delivery method, but when this changes and people en masse feel comfortable using their credit cards online, then mall tenants who offer similar products and don’t adapt will hurt.

“Shops are medieval. They have only been built because there was no Internet,” said Oliver Samwer, one of the entrepreneurs trying to enact that change, recently. His company, Rocket Internet, has brought proven e-commerce sites, such as the fashion site Zalora and general merchandise store Lazada, to the Thai market with great success.

And, while there have been casualties (such as Symbols of Style, a polished online fashion and design magazine-cum-online-store that launched with much fanfare in 2012, only to struggle and then vanish), other start-ups are arriving all the time, such as the year-old Pomelo Fashion, which flogs Korean clothes and, in what could be a mall-hurting deal clincher for many, offers same-day delivery.

It’s not hard, appealing even, to imagine a near future in which we complete our purchases while splayed on our couches and then wait a few hours for a knock on the door instead of the alternative – inching through gridlock to find a parking space at a heaving mall, only to have to queue at checkouts, and then inch home again.

But this future – the day when e-commerce takes a big bite of the market share and we become even more sedentary than we are already – is still a way off. In fact, the expansionist business plans of many foreign brands appear to be counting on it. The recent

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While not of the people, a mall should, like the souks and bazaars of centuries past, be for the people. arrival in Bangkok of H&M, TopShop, Pull & Bear and Uniqlo, among other Western high-street brands, are all predicated on the calculated assumption that the offline Asian mall is a growth sector, and that we won’t be deserting them anytime soon.

And a cursory glance at our well-peopled ones is enough to prove they are on to something – they are still far from passé.

Ultimately this is because they are more than just places to shop.

We like them because many are, to a greater extent than in the West, simulacrums of local culture – both MBK and Terminal 21, for example, owe a debt to the Thai street market. We like them because we can meet up with our friends or dates easily at them, and stroll casually around, eyes and index finger glued to smartphone, without tripping over uneven kerbs or sleeping soi dogs. And, even if we don't like them, we find ourselves in them because there still aren’t that many air-conditioned alternatives of a hot Sunday afternoon.

hile online retailers are likely to gain share in many categories in the coming years, a piece of the retail pie that Bangkok’s malls should hold on to is the luxury piece. Since the early 20th century, there have always been places where the well-to-do could get their luxury shop on. Back in the 1930s, it was to the genteel shophouses of the Old Town’s Phraeng Bhuthorn to which wives of Thai nobility would venture to find their imported bonnets and glad rags. In the post WWII years, American-inspired department stores arrived. Among them was the Nightingale Olympic, a Brutalist store just across from the Pahurat area’s Old Siam which sold the latest and greatest 1960s Americana (and still does, believe it or not!), from Merle Norman cosmetics to wooden tennis rackets. And Daimaru, a popular Japanese department store on Rajadamri Road that introduced fixed pricing – and that mall mainstay: the escalator.

But the variety of wares they offered now looks positively quaint compared to ones on offer today, especially since the unveiling earlier this year of Central Embassy. This sinuous, sparkling monster, with its eight floors of ritzy stores and forthcoming Park Hyatt Hotel on top, has added yet more highfashion sparkle to that already generated by the long-standing luxury malls Gaysorn and Amarin. Its arrival has brought with it an avalanche of first-time or flagship stores by the likes of Ralph Lauren, Boyy, Christian Louboutin, Gucci, Saint Laurent

and Tom Ford.

They are rushing in, not because tourists buy a lot of luxury items – as Thailand’s import duty remains very high (30-60 percent), they don’t. Rather, these are stores aimed at our minted upper classes.

But this could change if the Thai Shopping Centres Association (TSCA) gets its way. Recently this collective mouthpiece proposed that the new government cut the import duty by 5 to 10 percent annually. “If the government could lower the tariff, Thailand would be able to compete better with Singapore and Hong Kong in attracting international tourists who covet luxury goods,” they wrote in a press release.

“Thai people would also be able to purchase the luxury goods without having to travel abroad.” The proposal forms part of their plan to turn Bangkok into “the ultimate shopping destination of Asia.” Other parts of that plan include expensive revamps (Emporium’s ongoing facelift is costing a cool 4 billion baht) and – yes – lots more mall projects, including EmQuartier and EmSphere, just across from Emporium. ill our malls still be heaving twenty, thirty or forty years from now? Or will, like their American counterparts, many languish empty due to an oversupply? The answer to this multibillion-baht question depends on a complex range of digital-world and real-world factors, and also on whether their developers address or ignore the truism staring them in the face: while not of the people, a mall should, like the souks and bazaars of centuries past, be for the people. “Beyond ridiculous.” “We need more green spaces, not retail places!” These sorts of incredulous comments are typical on news websites and forums when news of plans for yet another new one breaks (in this case the CentralWestGate).

Many are incensed that there are there are so many, and more coming, and that the plans for them appear to be put commercial profit over and above true public need. Others – the realists – have accepted them as a part (albeit an inorganic one) of our community and, as stakeholders, want to improve them. On Change.org you can find petitions asking for less, but much more common are ones lobbying for fine-tuning: more green space, seating areas, a children’s museum, bicycle and disabled parking, etc.

Unwittingly, in their calls they echo the idealism and sentiment of Victor Gruen, the inventor of the ubiquitous modern mall. After all, his groundbreaking but never fully realised plan put the mall at the heart of a larger urban or suburban ecosystem, one that possessed a quality that is rarely mentioned in matters retail: balance.

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Food Evolution How Bangkok’s food obsession has given us an abundance of good eats.

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hailand has always been famous for food. Its moreish marriage of salty, sweet and spicy has earned the national cuisine global renown. Many a foreign celebrity chef has arrived on these shores with camera crew in tow, gulping down fried insects with Sangsom, sweating over som tam, and marvelling at the flavour profile of tom yum goong. In recent years Bangkok has been able to leverage this culinary clout into an industry that has broad global appeal. Where in the past, Singapore or Hong Kong might have had a distant lead when it came to top Asian foodie cities, today the diversity, quality and value of Bangkok’s leading restaurants are pushing the city ahead.

Never more than now is Bangkok enjoying status as a regional food capital.

Ten years ago Bangkok’s best restaurants were found almost exclusively in international hotels. Even Chef Ian Kittichai, owner of multiple restaurants here and abroad, was working as a hotel’s Executive Chef at the time.

He opened his first standalone restaurant in New York rather than launch one here – The States offered a better opportunity, despite the fact that he had his own Thai TV show, Mue Tong (Golden Hand). Name-checking some of the “top tables” of the mid-noughties – Sirocco at State Tower, Vertigo at Banyan Tree, Nahm at the Metropolitan, Koi and Eat Me – you’ll note that some have remained at the top, while others have been lost in a deluge of savvy newcomers. It’s not necessarily that their quality has faded, but that it’s a far more competitive landscape.

A significant share of the market has gone to young Thai entrepreneurs and culinary school graduates launching their own projects: Le Du, Aston, Little Beast and La Table De Tee come to mind. Then there’s the ever-growing expat contingent with their own cuisines giving us highly rated restaurants like Gaggan, Appia, Water Library and Opposite Mess Hall. Then there are established Thai chefs promoting their own spin on tradition – Siam Wisdom, Issaya Siamese Club and Supanniga among them. We’ve got community mall restaurants, artisanal food makers, fine drinks purveyors, classy supper enclaves, pop-up kitchens and an ever-expanding offering of sushi, ramen and okonomiyaki. Bangkok’s foodies must be some of the most spoiled on the planet.

As the dining scene here matures, the collective palate of Bangkokians grows more discerning. “Diners are looking not only for great food, but the whole dining experience – ambience, drinks, service – the whole package,” says Ian Kittichai. Chef Ian’s restaurants place a lot of emphasis on creating the right ambience – you won’t find fluorescent lights or bossanova covers in any of his establishments. Much to his dismay, however, Bangkok is still susceptible to less-than-sophisticated trends like donuts, cronuts and caramel-slathered popcorn, but overall, our predilection for finer tastes has shaped a diverse – and delicious – food scene.

We’ve also managed, by and large, to separate the wheat from the chaff. “We have seen so many new concepts opened by those with disposable spending yet knowing very little of the industry,” says Nico Vivin, French-born maker of artisanal foie gras. “But Bangkok realised slowly that this was foolish, so there was room for smaller but passionate artisans and restaurants to pop up and forge ahead. With the popularity of cooking TV shows such as Iron Chef and Masterchef Bangkokians have also become more knowledgeable about good food and fine cuisine which has raised their expectations.” ne of the better trends to emerge from an enlightened eating society is that towards organic, sustainable produce. The poster couple for this segment is Bo.Lan’s Bo (Duangporn Songvisava) and Dylan Jones. Since launching their restaurant in 2009, community interest in healthy eating has risen exponentially.

“Over the last five years, there has been a rise of awareness of organic restaurants not only in Bangkok but all around Thailand,” says Bo. “Both consumers and suppliers want to know more about it and want be part of it; most of the time for a good cause.” The biggest change she’s seen is the availability and reliability of organic produce in the market, though some misconceptions remain.

“Some people still think that organic food is macrobiotic and consists of grain and legumes only. Some think that organic is hydroponic. Some think that organic is overrated and it is OK to eat chemical residue in food. Some also think that it is overly expensive.

The truth is you can find affordable organic food.”

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“It's good to see bigger companies offering products that aren't pumped full of hormones.”

A tasty offshoot of the organic/ sustainable movement is that of artisanal food products and the nose-to-tail, farm-totable concept. A few upscale restaurants have carved a niche here, helping diners overcome any potential squeamishness with their inventive uses of lesser-known cuts. Smith – another Ian Kittichai joint (lead

by Chef Peter Pitakwong), Appia, Quince and Little Beast are among the forerunners. The nose-to-tail dining concept goes hand in hand with ethical farming practices – nothing is wasted, pigs are freerange. Star artisanal butcher Joe Sloane sources only “happy pigs” and takes the best of whatever local farmers have rather than dictate to farms what he wants.

“When I first came here there was no organic food,” he says.

“Villa might have had one thing, but it was all ridiculously expensive. Now if you go to any of the supermarkets, there's a huge range of things that are organic or even just free range. It’s good to see bigger companies offering products that aren't pumped full of hormones and people can go into a shop and buy more natural meats and vegetables.” decade ago street-side dining was exclusively Thai in flavour.

Today, joining the famous street-food night markets in Sukhumvit soi 38 is a food truck selling out of burgers on an almost nightly basis. It didn’t take the Daniel Thaiger crew long to conquer the stomachs of Bangkok diners – perhaps they arrived at the right time to ride the crest of the burger wave into culinary prominence.

Doling out juicy, fresh-grilled gourmet burgers, they represent another important movement in local dining history: the food truck.

It's a logical evolution of the street vendor cart, pandering to the average Bangkok diner’s predilection for outdoor eating and inexpensive gourmet food on-the-go. Owners don’t have to pay restaurant rental and overheads for staff are minimal, with savings passed on to the consumer.

Anyone can get in on the game. Other food trucks we’ve seen on Bangkok’s streets include: Mothertrucker (burgers), Orn the Road (also burgers), Summer Street (seafood), Hotdogs & Buns and “Thailand’s first mobile wood-fired pizza oven,” Pizza Aroy. On a healthier tip there’s the Banh Mi Boy truck, doling out crunchy baguettes stuffed with Vietnamese pork patties. In the great democratisation of food, these trucks are as likely to be serving Sukhumvit as they are the student enclave of Town in Town or the backpacker bars of Khao San Road.

Where some Bangkokians are lining up for foie gras burgers from the back of a truck, others are lining up for foie gras at a five-star brunch buffet. While the hype surrounding bombastic brunch offerings has died down a bit – St Regis’s Dom Perignon Grand Sunday Brunch at 7,900 baht per head signalled its peak – brunchhaving is still a big thing.

More conservative families are still hitting up big hotels, while the younger, upwardly mobile crew are queuing outside Rocket in Sathorn and Roast and Tribeca in Thong Lo. Eggs benedict may eventually usurp fresh oysters for favourite brunch item, with more American-style cafés introducing the starchy Sunday rotation of waffles with fried chicken, pancakes and breakfast burritos. Independent gourmet coffee makers are joining in, too, revelling in the roast, and offering an international array of beans and blends. o what does the future hold for Bangkok’s bellies? Greater choice, higher quality produce, more organic options and, hopefully, better food for everyone. “The restaurant scene will continue to develop and grow. The financial overheads are still less than neighbouring big cities like Singapore and Hong Kong and Bangkokians love to eat,” says Chef Ian. He’d like to see less widespread patronage of fast food chains, but overall the people of Thailand are pretty savvy when it comes to what they eat. On the topic of organic foods and sustainability, Bo reveals that by 2018 Bo.Lan is aiming to be 100 percent carbon-footprint-free.

“I hope that the organic movement is not just a scene, a trend or a fad,” she says, “but a way to live, with an understanding of producer, middle-man and consumer.”

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Getting Physical

Though Bangkok is becoming increasingly buff, there’s still plenty of room for “gains.”

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t wasn’t long ago that fitness in Bangkok was an anomaly.

The very idea of doing strenuous activity and intentionally breaking a sweat was aberrant. Running around outside was something only professional athletes did – you’d never dream of joining in, much less pay a trainer to force you into such a scenario.

Even indoor, air-conditioned fitness was scarce. It’s hard to believe now, in a time when Fitness First takes up prime real estate in practically every major mall and office block, but back then, there was no Body Combat. No Pump.

No Spin class. If you wanted a personal trainer, you had to book one through a luxury hotel.

Leading the development of the fitness industry here were a few entrepreneurial fitness devotees.

Some, like Pilates instructor Patricia Duchaussoy, fell into it almost by accident. When Patricia first arrived in Bangkok 17 years ago, hotels were the only places employing fitness professionals; she was employed by Marriot, who “were looking for a female with maturity.” Initially teaching dance, she soon had the chance to introduce her real passion to Thailand.

“They asked me what my hobby was and I said, ‘Pilates,’” recalls Patricia. “So they employed me as a Pilates teacher because nobody was doing that. They put an article in the Bangkok Post and many American people came; only American people knew Pilates at the time. At that point I only wanted to do what I really wanted to do, so I was really happy to bring this method to the Thai population.”

Eventually the demand for Pilates allowed Patricia to open her own studio on Sukhumvit Soi 39. Back then she had a small, exclusive clientele of local celebs and society ladies who wanted private, one-on-one sessions. That original Pilates Studio recently moved to a more visible location in Jasmine Building on Soi 23.

If you look up from street level, or catch a glimpse from the BTS, you can recognise it by the oversized hammocks dangling in the windows. These hammocks are the equipment for Body Fly, Patricia’s own creation.

Patricia created the Body Fly method and accompanying instructor course as an organic progression from learning aerial dance (she paid a Cirque du Soleil acrobat to come to Bangkok to train her for two months). It’s a fitness system that combines aerial

dance with yoga and Pilates moves. It’s not as difficult as it looks, she assures me, demonstrating some kind of complicated inverted flip. But you do need to complete ten sessions of basic moves before you graduate onto the “flying” positions, to guard against injury. The “sport” has now been licensed around the world, from France to China. She says it draws in a young, mainly Thai crowd.

At age 51, Patricia, who admits she’s stronger than her 17-year-old daughter, is the best advertisement for her own businesses. She’s happy to be witnessing a move towards active lifestyles.

“People are not just looking at working out like before, like building up bulky muscles,” she says. “They want to do something that brings them to a Zen-like state, thinking of their bodies, being focused while they exercise in order to get rid of their stress. It’s the tendency of this decade, I think: detox programs, healthy juice, raw food – it all goes together.” owadays there’s a flashy modern gym in practically every major mall complex and office block. Standalone gyms and chains like Fitness First and California Fitness have made weightlifting and group classes accessible to more people, when before, these facilities were restricted to luxury hotels. Before the influx of mass-appeal gyms here there were trainers, like Patricia, with hotel clients and private classes in client’s condos, quietly spreading the word. Daniel Remon of Fitcorp Global was one.

“I was the first foreign personal trainer to create a legal entity and develop a private fitness business in the city,” says Daniel, who launched here in 2002. Aside from the main gym – The Aspire Club, located at Asoke intersection – the company runs exclusive luxury getaways that offer specialised detox, weightloss and boot camp programs. If you see a boot camp in progress around Benjakiti Park, it’s likely Aspire’s initiative, Daniel having pioneered the concept here. “And we’re still the only structured and legal outdoor boot camp program in Bangkok.”

One of the first people to bring Western-style fitness to Bangkok, Daniel has seen how the industry has developed over the years. He’s seen trends cycle in and out of fashion

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with some major warps and wefts shaping how people work-out here. “We’ve seen a large shift away from machinebased training towards more functional, body-weight and movement-based training,” says Daniel. “We’ve also witnessed a strong movement towards running, outdoor exercising, running events, fun runs, cycling and triathlons. Yoga continues to be popular among women, as does Pilates, and we continue to see the rise in popularity of muay Thai gyms and boxing as a fun way to stay fit among men and women.”

Daniel’s clientele are equal parts Thai and foreigner.

While there are exponentially more options for gym-based fitness today than there were as recently as five years ago, the industry in Bangkok is still quite young. CrossFit, which has more than 10,000 gyms worldwide, has only one in central Bangkok (at Aspire). There aren’t many dedicated places for rock climbing or cycling or even indoor swimming. Fitness and healthy lifestyle practices aren’t comprehensively taught in schools. “Considering the size of the city, there are still very few international fitness concepts and facilities,” Daniel says.

Like Patricia, Daniel is more interested in improving lives through nutrition and exercise, than hitting a sales quota. They both agree that this is the biggest fault of the fitness industry in Bangkok – that it’s driven solely from a business perspective rather than providing quality training and innovative approaches to health and fitness. “As far as we know, we are the only ones who have developed science-based programming and lifestyle change combined with nutrition-focused systems for results,” says Daniel.

“And Aspire is the first and still the only facility in Bangkok to offer hypoxic-based training. We also incorporate the use of activity trackers and smart watches into our clients’ accountability programs and have introduced genetic testing and gene nutrition as we move towards medicine-based wellness.” hile Western-style gyms have certainly found a following in Bangkok, “fitness” in the Western sense – voluntarily sweating outside in the sun, for instance – isn’t a fantastic match with Thai culture. There are other ways of staying healthy and fit that don’t involve running in circles around a park or hoisting

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kettlebells hither and dither. More alternative approaches to staying healthy are emerging due to many Thais’ preference for something more private and, importantly, more fun. Patricia’s success with Body Fly is a great example of how Bangkok is ready for more unusual, specialised forms of fitness. Cherry Chandon, singer and founder of the Diva of Arts performing-arts school at Asoke, is planning to launch another soon: pole dance.

“It is absolutely perfect,” she says. “It includes swimming – the muscles are the same as swimming – and dancing at the same. It’s so much fun. You’ve got everything – you work muscles here and everywhere in the big muscle groups. It slims the whole body.”

It’s a sensitive project, given Cherry’s current clientele of international school students and VIPs who might perceive the idea the wrong way, but it’s something she strongly believes in.

As a performer, as well as dance and singing instructor, and spokes-model for Megalife’s Slim & Fit Percentage Suit, Cherry needs to maintain a svelte, healthy look, “the natural way – I don’t like surgery or ‘technology’ in the body.” While she looks after her body – with even more intensity now at age 40, she says – her fitness routine takes place at home with two types of equipment: exercise bands and a waist-twisting disc. Though she’s held several gym memberships over the years, she doesn’t like going to a gym. The concept of Western-style fitness fanaticism has had a positive impact on local attitudes, she concedes, but for a large contingent of locals it will never catch on.

“For fitness in a gym I always feel like I’m in a social situation because of all of the people,” she explains. “I hate the shower room because I like a high level of privacy. To be honest,” she adds, “it’s not Thai style to concentrate on health in this way. Many ladies in Thailand don’t want to lose time waiting in a queue for equipment and are bored with hanging around with people they don’t know. We stay healthy by not drinking, not going out, sleeping early, eating good things and not fighting – this is healthy in Thai culture.”

Cherry, like many women, is more interested in forms of fitness that aren’t necessarily “fitness” – something private and fun, such as yoga and even Body Fly. “Things have changed a lot,” she says, “and I’m happy that Thais like to be healthier than before.”

“People are not just looking at working out like before, like building up bulky muscles. They want to do something that brings them to a Zen-like state.”

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painting a scene To be an artist in Bangkok is still to practice the art of living dangerously.

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or many of its champions, Bangkok’s visual arts scene resembles half a rainbow. When it shines it shines brightly, but something is stopping it from reaching the elusive pot of gold.

But before the disappointment sets in, just look at how far that rainbow has come.

Back in 1949, Thailand’s first National Exhibition of Art was won by Khien Yimsiri, a graduate of Bangkok’s preeminent finearts school, Silpakorn University. Khien had received tutelage in London under the world-famous abstract sculptor Henry Moore, but was first and foremost a disciple of Silpa Bhirasri, the Italian sculptor who, as well as founding Silpakorn (which grew out of the School of Fine Arts that same year), initiated the awards. As such, Khien was typical of the artists who prevailed back then – adept at fusing foreign modes of art with indigenous folk techniques and turning them into work (a sinuous bronze sculpture, in his case) that spoke powerfully to local audiences.

And so it continued. As it had done in the first half of the 20th century, modern Thai art continued to take its cue from Western art movements – impressionism, expressionism, cubism and surrealism, etc – for most of the second half. In the absence of many galleries, the National Exhibition of Art became the tentpole event for young artists looking to show their work to the public. And Silpakorn was the main incubator for the artists taking part: names such as Inson Wongsam, Sawasdi Tantisuk, Chalood Nimsamer and Paitun Muangsomboon, among others. During the fifties and sixties, many went to Europe to study, came back and took up teaching posts at Silpakorn, creating a self-perpetuating cycle that helped sustain the university’s dominance.

The sixties saw a fade in prominence of the National Exhibition of Art as galleries started to spring up, and also an uptake of abstract and surrealist art. But for many, it only started getting really interesting in the seventies, when, as the renowned curator and serving Ministry of Culture head, Dr. Apinan Poshyananda puts it, “Thai artists reacted strongly against politics and rightwing ideologies.” Prompted by rural poverty, social problems and the political suppression of Thanom Kittikachorn’s military dictatorship, and spurred on by the writings of Thai Marxist academic Jit Phumisak, artists began producing vociferously sociopolitical work under the banner of the Art for Life movement.

Another key moment in the seventies was the opening of the

Bhirasi Institute of Modern Art. Founded by a group of Thais and expats in 1974, this private space on Sathorn Soi 1 held some landmark shows before closing abruptly in 1988.

Pratuang Emjaroen, one of the Art for Life movement’s guiding lights, had shows there, as did a young Apinan, then an experimental video artist. “In my opinion it was one of the most important cultural institutions of the past 50 years,” says Numthong Sae Tang, owner of the long-running Numthong Gallery, which opened in 1997. “It didn’t only motivate the fine art movement in Thailand but also promoted other art forms such as film, theatre, music, plays and performance.”

Some viewed the scene back then as too derivative. “When I started in the mid-seventies, there was no Thai style and the only prevalent styles were impressionist/decorative and American abstract paintings,” says Alfred Palwin, an Austrian expatriot whose now defunct Visual Dhamma gallery is cited by many as a Bangkok pioneer, as it introduced the avant garde to a conservative visual arts scene, as well as helped raise the profile of late great conceptual artist Montien Boonma. It opened in 1981 with a show that he advertised with an unusual flyer. “I used a poster of the four artists in portrait to make the artists more recognisable to the public,” he says. “Promoting Thai art at that time was so hopeless here that I had to travel abroad. But even there, Thailand was put in the category of cheap-oil-paintings-for-$5.”

Others remember it more fondly. “The art scene when I first started out in the early 1980s was most exhilarating and full of drama,” says Apinan. “There were lots of quarrels and in-fights among art camps which made the Thai art scene very lively, and challenge against the control and influence of the Silpakorn camp in art contests spurred art activities and experimentation.”

Shortly after completing his post-graduate studies in Paris, Montien Boonma staged “Stories from the Farm” at the National Gallery in 1989. It was a show that marked his renouncement of painting in favour of large-scale, Arte Povera-inspired sculptural

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works composed of found materials. According to many interviewed for this story, Montien was the dominant force in Thai art through the next decade right up to his premature death in 2000 and beyond. “Montien Boonma was the most important and influential Thai artist of the last 20 years,” says Petch Osathanaugrah, a well-known local collector (and the chairman of Bangkok University). “He shaped Thai contemporary art.”

Gridthiya Gaweewong, artistic director of the non-profit art gallery Jim Thompson Art Centre, misses the energy and idealism of that time. “After the economic crash in 1997, the alternative art scenes, artists collectives and art activisim were so active and vibrant,” she says. She’s referring in part to experimental non-profit spaces such as Project 304, which she founded in an apartment around Samsen train station, and Chinatown's About Café. As well as these artist-driven creative hives – all no longer with us – she also recalls it being a time “when many international curators visited Bangkok and our artists were invited to join major international shows and their works were acquired by major museums.”

oday, Silpakorn still produces many of Thailand’s most successful artists, especially painters. The dreamy surrealist Prateep Kochabua, painter of grimacing self-portraits Chatchai Puipia, Renaissance revivalist Natee Utarit, and Lampu Kansanoh, whose giant-faced portraits of Thai everymen and women have made her one of the most bankable artists of her generation, are all Silpakorn graduates. But its dominance has waned as other art schools have opened, transnational Thai artists (think Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jakkai Siributr and Korakrit Arunanondchai) have taken other career routes, and Bangkok’s cultural mix has continued to diversify.

“The situation has changed over the last two decades because of all the alternative art spaces and the international platforms, which serve as an alternative to the national art competitions.

It’s up to artists, now, to choose what type of schools or camps they want to ally with. Now young artists are lucky to have alternatives,” says Gridthiya. “The Silpakorn University camp still influences the art scene, though to a lesser degree,” agrees Petch.

While galleries have come and gone, the influence of art schools shifted, and mediums and themes evolved (mixed-

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media, video and conceptual-installation works are common these days, and themes broached tend to be more personal), one of the few constants in the scene has been expats. Employed by the palace, Silpa Bhirasri brought the know-how necessary to create skilled artisans who would help ennoble the monarchy, the national religion and the environment. But since then, other foreigners have helped build up the art infrastructure in different ways. Today, many of the most professionally programmed commercial galleries in town, including 338 Oida, Thavibu and H Gallery, are foreign-owned.

A non-profit initiative that tasks itself with preserving Thai art ephemera, the Thai Art Archives, was also founded by American Gregory Galligan and his Thai partner.

Another constant link between then and now: a big disconnect between what many see as the latent potential of Bangkok’s contemporary art scene and the stark reality, largely due to a string of myopic government administrations that fail to see its potential as strategic infrastructure.

“When I first became involved in the Thai art scene in the mid-tolate nineties, there was talk about how Thailand had the potential to become Southeast Asia’s cultural hub,” says Steven Pettifor, a Bangkok-based curator and editor of BAM, the city’s free art-listings map. “But governments haven’t appreciated how art and culture could propel the country forward on the international stage, whereas Singapore has invested large amounts into its cultural infrastructure in recent years and has now firmly adopted that mantle.”

Singapore often comes up in conversations as an example of what Thailand could have been. “If the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre had had the right amount of budgeting and support, not to mention world-class architecture, Bangkok would have been the centre of contemporary art in Southeast Asia, instead of Singapore,” says Petch, adding tartly, “because we have better artists, and the country is also located in the heart of this region.”

Better known by its acronym, the BACC – a nine-storey Guggenheim-inspired edifice occupying a corner of Siam Square’s Pathumwan intersection – opened in July 2008, but plans for it had been mooted as far back as 1996. It has symbolic value visà-vis people power, believes Apinan, as it almost never happened at all: the late Bangkok governor Samak Sundaravej attempted to replace the project with an aquarium and parking lot, but an artistled campaign won the day. When it finally arrived, many art-scene

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insiders cautiously welcomed it on account of its over 4,000 square metres of exhibition space – although many questioned its vision, curatorial structure and prominently positioned retail stores.

As the years have passed, these concerns have come to look prescient. Some ambitious shows have been staged there – including several all-encompassing surveys of modern and contemporary Thai art – but, for many observers, more conspicuous has been the lack of a public collection and ad hoc approach. Apinan, who guest-curated the current BACC show “Thai Charisma” (which closes November 16th), acknowledges its imperfections. “The BACC needs to seriously rethink its mission and vision as a public space,” he says. “After nearly a decade in service, it still lacks [certain] basic requirements of an art institute, such as doors for each gallery space for safety, energy, and sound control. The BACC needs to redesign its functional spaces as well as exhibition programs to raise itself to the international standards expected to compete with neighbouring countries.”

These are fighting words, but as some point out, Apinan, a high-level bureacrat, only has limited powers. Case in point: the Ministry of Culture plans to build a new contemporary art gallery at Bangkok’s Thailand Cultural Centre by the end of 2015. It will house a permanent collection of heritage artifacts and contemporary art, he reveals, as well as temporary exhibitions. But while he lobbied for a cutting-edge design, a more conservative design was green-lit instead. urvey Bangkok’s visual art scene over the past 50 years and you’ll find it littered with such disappointments: the lack of a Bangkok Biennale; the closure of V64, the city’s first (and last?) self-sufficient artist's community; and the opening of a huge private museum of mainly surrealist and neo-traditional Thai art, Boonchai Bencharongkul’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in a location (north of Chatuchak) that is off-putting to all but the keenest of art lovers.

Given these missed opportunities, is it any surprise

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that, while the art scene is reaching more people than ever, there remains a disconnect with the masses?

As Gridthiya puts it, “Art is still regarded as something inaccessible and unrelated to people’s everyday lives. We should have done better to educate people and bring art closer to people.” But if you thought you, the public, were hard-done-by, then spare a thought for the artists. Being a Bangkok artist remains a lonely business – there are still very few collectors. Plus, unlike Singapore, there’s no direct state support in the form of grants or subsidised studios.

And yet, there are reasons to be cheerful. The scene is no longer such a boy’s club. Petch plans to build a private museum on Rama IV Road (tentative due date: 2018). A new award for art students, the Art Forward Fund Award, has emerged. And Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong was recently in town, visiting galleries and talking of Thailand being an important part of a growing “Guggenheim constellation.” Meanwhile, new commercial and non-commercial spaces continue to open.

Increasingly, some of these outfits dabble in artist residencies (Toot Yung Art Centre), allowing artists to focus and crash for free as they work on a new series, with the gallery taking a percentage of anything sold in the resulting show.

Yes, there are fewer artist-led projects than back in the late nineties, but the local scene is still being driven by a DIY mindset and self-starters who have no qualms about living dangerously.

Implicit in each of these spaces, of course, is a jab at the establishment – at the conservatism, the lack of funding, the riskaversion, and the politics. These are spaces that are part passion project, part endurance test, and that, excitingly for us, wield full creative control over what they exhibit and how they present it.

The quality of work varies wildly and the pot of gold remains a long way off, but the Thai art scene shines brighter than ever.

No one would swap the rainbow then for the one we enjoy now.

“Art is still regarded as something inaccessible and unrelated to people’s everyday lives. We should have done better to educate people and bring art closer to people.”

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The Future

The future of Bangkok won't simply arrive – it has to be created. he city is sinking even as it rises.

Even as new developments evolve and more buildings scrape the sky and green spaces intensify the metropolis’s verdancy, Bangkok is a city whose topography is sliding slowly seaward. “Not many people are aware,” says Itthi Trisirisatayawong of Chulalongkorn’s Department of Survey Engineering, “that certain parts of inner Bangkok have subsided more than one metre and are already below sea level. If heavy subsidence at the rate of 25 millimetres per year or faster occurs in coastal areas for a few decades, it is not too hard to imagine what the consequences would be.”

But the city is rising even as it sinks.

Just take a look at what they’re up to all along the Chao Phraya River. Look at what’s happening there and tell me Bangkok isn’t rising. Along the river, its literal stature rises in tandem with its figurative. You’ve got the Avani Bangkok Riverside going up 26 storeys high, and the Landmark Waterfront going 37, and the Manam Residences easily topping them both at 54.

But progress can’t be measured just vertically, right?

There have to be other standards of measurement. There has to be due consideration paid to Tha Maharaj, a community pavilion set to open by the end of the year, where tradition will be acknowledged, boat piers will be added, and more shops and restaurants will proliferate. Or, bigger still, what about Icon Siam? Come 2017, 80,000 square metres of Bangkok will be converted into a complex of shopping centres and apartment structures and even a 3,500seat auditorium, all of it deserving its own postal code. It’s even going to manage to showcase, somehow, the Seven Wonder Icons of Thailand, right here in Bangkok along the

river. This is 50 billion baht’s worth of bigger, and it’s coming here, to this city supposedly going under the sea.

And maybe that’s part of the problem, with the city as well as its sinking – this inexorable and exponential growth. Maybe a metric is needed other than sheer metrics itself. Ask ordinary citizens about the city they’d like to see – about the city they hope Bangkok will become in the next decade – and they talk about high rises and retail outlets, if at all, as things to be avoided. “No more new malls,” says Pruepat Songtiang, 28. “If so, malls with loads more trees.”

That’s what they often say, and they mean it, but what they’re really giving is a prescription rather than a proscription, an affirmation rather than a denial. They’re giving, as Monruedee Jansutthipan, 35, does, expression to a desire for “more green space in Bangkok. There can be more parks in the city centre. There’s a lot of vacant space with thick greenery but it’s all private land. I hope land developers start thinking about creating green space next to their areas and push up their property prices, rather than just putting buildings on the whole plot.”

Bangkok already has its green spaces, and there are more on the way. Besides Lumphini Park – Bangkok’s crown jewel – there is the even larger cluster of parks collectively known as Chatuchak Discovery Garden, a 112-hectare mound of green right in the heart of town. There is National Stadium and Bang Kachao; Benjasiri and Rama IX Garden; Saphan Rama IX and Princess Mother. This is only a partial accounting. In Benjakiti Park is an entire obstacle course’s worth of fitness equipment, including even a BMX ramp and bicycle lane. Until recently, this bicycle lane – depending

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Bangkok provides only three square metres of green space per person, which does not measure up favourably to any of its sister cities throughout Asia.

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on how you define the term – was the only one to be found in Bangkok. But two new ones were created just this August, both at repurposed lakes in Khlong Sam Wa. Even after all this, Bangkok provides only about three square metres of green space per person, which does not measure up favourably to any of its sister cities throughout Asia. The average surface temperature in the city continues to rise, alarmingly so, and recent hopes that the 1.2 square kilometres of unused land in the Makkasan area will be turned into a park-cum-museum have recently been discouraged. The state railways own that land, and it’s believed they will have to sell it to private developers to liquidise some of their debt. This is immensely frustrating to those who look at its size and imagine it as Southeast Asia’s answer to Hyde Park in London.

Some of those looking with concern at Bangkok’s future are just as concerned with the past – they’re concerned, that is, with how the future Bangkok will treat its present past. They’re not all optimistic. When I ask Pongkwan Lassus, an architect specialising in heritage, how well she anticipates this heritage being preserved, she says, “If they don't do anything now, in 10 years more than 50 percent of BMA [Bangkok Metropolitan Administration] local heritage will be gone. As we can see now, some of the heritage on Charoenkrung Road has been demolished to make the MRT [Mass Rapid Transit] station at Wat Mungkorn. Valuable buildings there are not registered as national monuments.” She’s not

finished: “And one year from now, if the MRT station opens, there will be more demolition, and the architectural heritage around that zone will be replaced by new huge buildings and towers because there are no rules and regulations to stop the developer from doing so.” She’s still not finished: “And the charm of Bangkok Chinatown will be gone forever, as well as all the other charming old communities. It's really time, now or never, that the BMA establish their list of valuable buildings and start to plan for a real rehabilitation project, to make Rattanakosin old town a real precious old town to match its name.” ont Armattasn, 30, isn’t hopeful for any changes in the next 10 years, since he hasn’t seen any in the last 30: “Bangkok is pretty much the same: traffic jams, food stalls on the sidewalks, pollution, dead plants, poor free Wi-Fi and public services – you name it. My wish,” he continues, “is that 10 years from now, people are less selfish and start making things right: not selling stuff on sidewalks, caring for others and providing more accessible transportation for the disabled, more places to exercise in the park. And then perhaps, little by little, Bangkok will become less individualistic.”

One way we can be less selfish, according to Manta Klangboonkrong, 33, is to change how we deal with the problem of stray dogs and cats – a problem that, Manta believes, could be “very easily solved with a little bit stricter enforcement and public awareness.” This will never happen “as long as people can’t get past the belief that feeding strays is a virtuous act of tam boon, when in fact they are breeding

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Just because something is a law doesn't mean it will always be practised as a reality. Anybody familiar with the traffic habits of Bangkokians knows that. unwanted animals prone to fatal hostility and contractible diseases.”

Manta is right, of course, about the need for stricter enforcement and public awareness, but until that happens, letting animals starve does not seem to be a desirable solution, anymore than letting humans starve is a desirable solution for getting rid of street vendors.

That’s exactly what would happen if a lot of people had their way and street vendors were outlawed. Sudden change is by its nature disruptive, but fortunately there have been some innovative solutions proposed for minimising rather than eliminating the problem, allowing vendors to retain their livelihood while customers retain access to the vendors. A former president of the Association of Siamese Architects, Smith Obayawat, has recently initiated a project that would minimise the amount of “public space [used] for private functions.” It would require that vendors not display their product on tables that spread and sprawl ad infinitum until there’s nowhere left to walk, but rather in vertical boxes, neatly finite and securely self-contained.

But just because something is a law, of course, doesn’t mean it will always be practised as a reality.

Anyone familiar with the traffic habits of Bangkokians knows that. Motorcyclists are, by a wide margin, the city’s biggest outlaws, traffically speaking. To penalise and prosecute all the wrong-way riders, sidewalk riders, rocket-speed riders, stop-light-jumping riders, and helmet-less riders would exhaust the police and clog

the courts. It is, by this point, simply impractical, maybe impossible.

But people aren’t so apathetic when it comes to the safety of children on motorcycles. On a recent Friday night, at a major intersection in Klong Thoey, traffic came to the kind of voluntary standstill seldom seen in Bangkok, when a child was thrown from a motorbike and lay in the middle of the intersection, terrified and crying, without a helmet. The adults who’d come to his aid seemed terrified too, and it’s these kind of adults who are aggressively advocating for better protection of children on motorbikes. Only seven percent of those who ride even wear them, and who knows how many of the 2,600 childhood road deaths per year could be prevented otherwise?

But in the Bangkok of the future – that idealised city of the future – traffic will be nothing more than an auxiliary supplement to every citizen’s primary mode of transport: the public rail. That’s the dream.

The MRT and the Bangkok Transit System (BTS) are both expanding, their tentacular reach extending further out and deeper into the city’s marginal territories, burrowing way underground and soaring way overhead.

If drawn as a diagram, it could function as a rough representation of the city itself: simultaneously tunnelling under and stretching skyward. You could stare at it all day, wondering how much longer Bangkok, rising in its sinking, will continue to defy gravity.

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SPanish charmer The career of Spanish super-designer Patricia Urquiola continues to blossom. Meeting her explains why. by max crosbie-jones / portraits by dan carabas with thanks to badipol chutrakul, b&b italia

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Fishbone low tables for Moroso.

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f people can resemble their pets, then surely designers can resemble their designs? This might sound a daft and whimsical notion but it’s one that comes sprinting to mind during a conversation with Patricia Urquiola, the Spanish-born force of nature who ranks as one of only a few design powerhouses to be approaching household-name status. Tactile, vibrant, unpretentious, fun – these characteristics seem to apply just as readily to Patricia Urquiola the person as they do your typical Patricia Urquiola design.

A brief introduction: Hailing from Asturias in Northern Spain, Patricia is one of Milan’s most prized immigrato, having studied there in the mid-eighties and lived there ever since. But the renown of this fiery blonde fiftysomething stretches much further than that. Dabbling in industrial and product design, interiors and architecture, today her versatility, hyper-productivity, and global reputation are rivalled only by Philippe Starck and Antonio Citterio. Her practical yet often sculptural furniture designs and installations have won her awards (including Designer of the Decade accolades) and pride of place in permanent exhibitions, including one at New Husk Outdoor for B&B Italia.

York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). And yet, among many industry insiders, “Patty” – as she is often affectionately referred to – is just as legendary for her disarming geniality as her formidable output.

In a recent interview in Pin-Up magazine, the interviewer describes how, during an open house for journalists at her home studio, “Patricia greeted each member of the press with a hearty kiss on the cheek,” and how “first-time visitors were visibly taken aback both by the generosity of the gesture and by her apparent confidence in her immune system.” When we meet in the Milan showroom of B&B Italia – one of the many top-flight design houses she works with regularly – that immune system has lumbered Patricia with a cold, and so the hearty kiss on the cheek never comes. But something no less memorable does: an insect impression.

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“Creating this sofa over the past year, I was like ‘krrrrrrrrr’– making the sound of the tabano (horsefly),” she says, gesturing at a snug, cocoon-like armchair, and referring to the torturous creation of it. “She makes a sound like a helicopter and she’s so slow and heavy you can shoo her away. When I was doing that chair I was like that funny little insect buzzing around the room.”

Our chat – a tidal wave of idiosyncratic English peppered with Italian, Spanish and the odd, baffling Urquiola-ism – takes place on another new B&B Italia-Patricia Urquiola creation: the Husk. It is a super-comfy number that confirms the brand’s reputation for refined and ostensibly simple-looking furniture. If she were less engaging and there weren’t lots of people around, I might well drop off (it’s that super-comfy), but there’s no chance of that today. As she talks and her blue-green eyes sparkle, another popular moniker, “Hurricane Patricia,” starts to make sense.

It’s impossible not to be swept up by how engaging, passionate and BS-free someone who is – let’s not beat around the bush – here to help sell sofas can be.

Benefitting from B&B Italia’s expertise at making cushion moulds in-house (an all-too rare thing in the furniture industry nowadays), the Husk is, she explains, part of a family of sofas that began life three years ago. “The company was very happy with it and asked me to go on,” she says, becoming increasingly animated, “and then it volute (spiralled) into a little armchair, and then it volute into a sofa.”

A volute, or spiralling, appears to be a recurring theme in Patricia’s career. Of the 18 other new Studio Urquiola products debuted at showrooms and stands across Milan during the city’s sprawling design week, most are the result of working relationships that started small and then spiralled into something bigger. Once a company starts working with Patricia, it seems they want to keep working with Patricia.

Tactile, vibrant, unpretentious, fun – these qualities seem to apply just as readily to Patricia Urquiola the person as they do your typical Patricia Urquiola design.

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You have to be humble. You have to know what is right for each relationship. These companies aren’t companies; they are people.

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What is it about her that has brands lining up? The phrase “winning horse” has been bandied around. She gets business because she makes business. But for her it all boils down to people skills. You need to be a certain kind of person. You need to be curious about people; to have empathy. “If you are not a very emphatic person you will have problems working with different companies,” she explains. “I try to get the best I can out of every relationship.”

She likens these working relationships to friendships. “You have friends you go to the cinema with, and friends you go jogging with. If you go to see a film with the friend you go jogging with, and you go jogging with the one who loves cinema, you’re asking for disaster. Don’t you think so?

You have to be humble. You have to know what is right for each relationship. These companies aren’t companies; they are people.

They are human beings.”

And as with all friendships, there are disputes, but the good times outweigh the bad. “There are always bad meetings, good meetings, times when I go to bed saying, ‘That’s a disaster, I don’t want to do it, we have to stop it.’

And then another month goes by and I think, ‘Fantastic, that’s going well.’ And then in the end you arrive at something that’s more or less workable. You’re getting the elements in the right place. Things are done. And I’m finally happy.”

All are pared-down designs possessing an innate intelligence and nods to sustainability (she’s an avowed enemy of extravagance for extravagance’s sake). But setting them apart from other factorymade products are what you might call expressive “Patty” touches – dashes of bohemia, sensuality or whimsy. Many have something of her life, memory, or sense of the poetic bound up inextricably in them. “Often it is something emotional, at other times something very simple and quite trivial that gives me the idea,” she once said.

A case in point is Antibodi, a chaise longue she created for Moroso back in 2006, shortly after the birth of her second daughter. Exhibited during Milan design week as an example of how design and art can intersect, this appears, at first glance, to be a flower-petal chair, but is actually a playful dig at mollycoddling young mothers.

“That chair isn’t based on flora and nature – it’s based on the structure of an antibody, which is triangular and connected in three ways. When my second daughter was born, all the young mothers taking care of their babies were obsessed with antibodies good and bad, so I said, ‘Patricia, now we do an antibody chair; we make that Antibodi chaise longue for Moroso. thing and then we don’t talk any more about antibodies, we close that chapter.’” Her CV is littered with such subtly autobiographic, yet pragmatic, flights of fancy.

That so much of her life seeps into her work is not surprising given where she works: in a studio on Milan’s Piazzale Libia, atricia’s work sells. It looks good in magazines. It translates just across the courtyard from the family home. For her, the line well into the canapé-style tidbits offered up by design blogs between professional and private life is blurred almost beyond all such as Dezeen and Design Milk. This much we know. Exactly why recognition. “We live with many prototypes and many times my it does this, though, is harder to pinpoint. Perhaps it’s this: not only elder daughter comes in saying, ‘where is the cushion?,’ ‘where is does she have an infectious personality – that personality seeps into that tray?,’ ‘what happened to the vase?’ Because sometimes they her commercially savvy designs. She doesn’t just give us a new go downstairs and disappear,” she says. chair or vase, often she gives us something of herself.

As idiosyncratic as this sounds – imagine living in a household Among the long list of new Studio Urquiola products unveiled in of constantly fluctuating furniture, some of it only borderline Milan were earthy but industrially made ceramic tiles for Mutina, an safe – this is how she and her second husband Alberto Zontone, upholstered modular sofa for Moroso, and cosy-quirky rugs for Gan.

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Living room at the W Retreat & Spa Vieques Island, Puerto Rico.

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who is also her business partner, like it. The best design advice Patricia ever got was from Maddalena De Padova of the influential Milanese furniture company De Padova. She told her: “Patricia, you can’t create something that you don’t believe in or haven’t tried yourself.” Having a casa bottega, a home studio where life and art intermingle, allows her to do this – to come to understand first-hand what she will eventually give to others. But it also means the family is connected in a way it wouldn’t be otherwise. “I end work and my daughter sees me straight away.

She sits at the end of the table and she does her homework while I’m on conference calls. I press mute and go correct her and then I come back. Why not?” etting up Studio Urquiola in 2001 was the best thing Patricia Urquiola ever did. But it might easily have never happened.

Now in her fifties and busier than ever, she believes her career can be viewed as the journey of an ingénue gaining in confidence and confronting her own personal prejudices. “My prejudices have always been my own worst enemy,” she says. “It has taken a lot of time to eliminate them.”

These prejudices include preconceptions and biases about work typologies, processes and collaborating with certain people, but the biggest prejudice of all, she explains, concerns her – or, more precisely, her place as a woman in a still male-dominated industry.

After graduating in Milan, she held top positions at the furniture company De Padova and architecture firm Lissoni Associates during the nineties. But something held her back from taking what many around her thought was the natural next step. “When I thought about having my own studio with all the responsibilities and masculine attitudes that go with them, I would say, ‘No, no, I don’t think it’s for me,’” she says, laughing.

Ironically, one of the qualities that help her today – her amiability – might have held her back. “I didn’t have problems working in social environments, because I always find a way to give my opinion in a group, and I’m very open to other opinions,” she says. “I was a

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woman who was too busy working well with others.”

In 2001 the end of her first marriage and direct advice from one of her mentors, Pier Lissoni, convinced her to jump from the nest.

“Suddenly I didn’t have anything to lose,” she says. It proved to be her shrewdest career move so far. As quickly as word spread through the industry, work came in. On meeting and marrying her second husband, a life-work balance that was more conducive to a family took shape. “It was much better to have my own studio – to be without all the framework of others makes it much easier to organise my life.”

It was better, too, because it allowed her to make use of her training in architecture. “At the beginning I embraced design thinking that I would only be a designer, but then the clients who knew I was a trained architect said ‘Help me with a booth,’ ‘Help me with a house’, ‘I love your items and I want you to do my hotel,’” she says.

Her biggest projects to date have both been hotels: the Mandarin Oriental Barcelona and a W Hotel on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. The former – her first hotel commission – took three years and is a beautifully cohesive showcase of her talent with spaces. Inside it, daylight spills through a public atrium and onto interiors that, through her use of ornamental detailing and bold contemporary furniture (much of it hers), manage to channel both the city’s Catalan history and the brand’s Asian roots.

With more projects stacking up (a Lake Como hotel, private residences, a jewellery museum in Vicenza), she’s happy with the way these two disciplines now compliment and feed into each other. “Sometimes the needs of architectura oblige me to do design,” she says. “I have two aims that I deliver well and that are close to each other. I’m lucky, si.” hen Patricia gestures and rhapsodises and does passable insect-impressions, it’s easy to imagine that she must have been a very precocious child. Her wide-eyed curiosity about

At the beginning I embraced design thinking that I would only be a designer, but then the clients who knew I was a trained architect said ‘Help me with a booth,’ ‘Help me with a house,’ ‘I love your items and I want you to do my hotel.’

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Our work is like a doctor’s. We have to share our knowledge, to discuss our knowledge, and update our knowledge.

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objects and people suggest this must have been so. And then there’s her indefatigable warmth. At times, it seems that Patricia and I aren’t conducting an interview in the middle of a busy furniture store, a crowd of chic Milanese and her terse assistant looking on – we are bonding. Or maybe this is all an illusion and I’m just on the receiving end of the knack she has: of making everyone whose life she touches feel at ease. Comfortable.

Whether this knack is innate or learnt is an irreducibly complex question, but no doubt the nurture helped. As the middle Tropicalia chair for Moroso. child in a big and vocal familia with “a lot of brothers, sisters and cousins around,” Patricia was forced to be a social creature who took criticism on the chin. “I had to absorb myself and not listen to anyone many times. I was really open to people criticising me.”

Her mother studied philosophy (“She gave me a lot of advice and arguments”); her father was an engineer; her grandmother and older brother were both architects.

Though she doesn’t recall any epiphany during those years, she does recall spending hour upon hour playing with an ornate modernist dollhouse with her younger brother. “He had the cowboys and Indians; I had the little family. Sometimes we had a meeting in the lift,” she says wistfully before adding, “Perhaps that was when I began to understand what it means to waste time doing something I like.”

In 1980, aged 18, she moved to Madrid to study architecture, but three years later transferred to Milan’s polytechnic.

Something wasn’t right – it was too cosy. “I felt I understood the ambiance and that it was too obvious for me, Madrid. I needed to be in less of a comfort zone. And suddenly I was not in Spain anymore – no friends, no family, no connections,” she says. “I was about 20 or 21 and I had to restart and finish my studies in another language I didn’t speak. But why not go to Italia? That’s my character!”

Soon she was sitting in classes taught by some of Italy’s greatest progettista (a peculiarly Italian word for someone who

dabbles in both design and architecture). “In Madrid I was only an architect because the faculty was not connected with design.

But when I came to Milan, something shifted. The teachers were all designers and architects: Achille Castiglioni, Marco Zanuso.

There was a strange double layer that I wasn’t aware of before.”

Castilgioni, an early pioneer of intelligent, less-is-more design and creator of classics such as the Arco floor lamp, was particularly influential. And still is. Her distaste for needlessly extravagant design (oversized bathtubs, etc) can be traced back to him. And one of her favourite design maxims – If the creativity is your marmalade, then the brief is the bread that gives structure to the marmalade – was his.

Unsurprisingly, teaching is important to her. “Unless you have a character that means you suffer and it’s not good for you to do it, I think it should be obligatory,” she says. “The lessons that I gained have been so fantastic that I can’t imagine not doing the same for others.”

Today she imparts her own singular form of wisdom at the famous Domus Academy, although true to her open and self-effacing personality she doesn’t view herself as a teacher in the textbook sense.

“From the first day I always say to the students that I’m not going to be your mentor, but that we’re going on an empathetic journey together,” she says, as her assistant approaches to tell me my time is up. “We are going to share what I believe in this moment and we are going to discuss what we think about.”

Patricia appears to teach like she works – with curiosity and the sense that the other party’s perspective is as important as hers. This is the same deeply empathetic approach that wins her repeat work with a diverse range of collaborators – from luxury brands to female rug-makers in India – and leaves me feeling that we've connected in some deep and meaningful way in the space of minutes. “Our work is like a doctor’s. We have to share our knowledge, to discuss our knowledge, and update our knowledge. And I learn from you and you from me.”

(love me) Tender sofa for Moroso.

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in Asia. “If you are a loyal customer of particular brands, you hen you think of Hermès today, Birkins and silk scarves will love to keep or have all things from those brands.” If you and ties are the first things that come to mind, not leather love Longchamp’s nylon totes, what’s to keep you from buying saddles or harnesses. Not too many lunching ladies or corporate their raincoats or jackets? Similarly, it gives avid followers of dandies remember or even realise that the French luxury fashion designers the chance to say that their Serpente bag, just like their house started out in 1837 handcrafting horse harnesses and bridles charm pendant, is from Bvlgari. “People like to show who they for the caleches and carriages of rich European noblemen. It was are and their preferences,” says Wanida. “To own a luxury item only about eighty years later, in 1922, that Charles-Emile Hermès, makes one feel part of an elite group, and this is important for son of founder Thierry Hermès, had the glorious idea of making young executives.” handbags for the beau monde parading Champs-Élysées.

Diversified merchandising done right is a win-win situation for Over the next 25 years Hermès rapidly expanded into both brand and consumer. The fashion retail, introducing latter are attracted to luxury apparel, their famous silk fashion brands because of scarves and ties, perfumes their added emotional benefit and the bag that would soon and image-building. And the become known as the Kelly. brands are able to sell more Long before “diversification” products to an already existing became a term bandied about market. in luxury retail and a means for corporate strategy, Hermès Benefits and beyond had already proved itself an Sometimes brands diversify expert. A century after the not solely for remunerative maison made the decision to reasons. “Some diversifications delve into other possibilities, help brand promotion more the French fashion brand than revenues,” explains is still at the pinnacle of Tardivel. She pinpoints the luxury couture. Even though most recent trend of it continues creating beautiful From bags to bronzers to beddings: diversification among the saddles, it mostly gains the diversification of luxury. bigger brands: hotels and revenues from selling the luxury property. It’s not rare bags ubiquitously perched to see hotels and resorts now bearing the names of recognisable on the arms of celebrities, lunching ladies and society matrons. As fashion labels. Bvlgari has opulently designed hotels in some for its silk accessories, more than one million ties are supposedly of the world’s style capitals, while Versace has collaborated sold every year. with property developers to come up with high-end hotels Leading players in the fashion industry have been trying to and residentials. Then there’s Armani, which has interests follow the standard that Hermès unwittingly set all those years in hotels, restaurants and bars. In Bangkok, the Sofitel SO ago. In the last decade, diversification has become a must for proudly boasts of interiors designed by Christian Lacroix. In its luxury brands looking for ways to expand their consumer reach Singapore property, Sofitel is trumpeting a collaboration with and diversify their product portfolios. The European haute couture Karl Lagerfeld. While designers recognise the money-spinning houses are still leading the charge, with Louis Vuitton recently benefits of partnering up with property developers, they are in introducing timepieces and jewellery, Bvlgari shaping up its it for more than financial gain. Wanida says, “The Bvlgari and leather-goods business and Chanel previewing sneakers earlier other designer hotels may be profitable but are more a means this year. Even Hermès has not exhausted its expansion options; in of public relations, of bolstering the brand ID, than a source of 2011, it hired Pierre Hardy to design a jewellery collection. revenue.”

“Diversification gives more chances for customers to enjoy or In an industry that builds and feeds on image, diversification see more variety of luxury items,” says Wanida Tardivel, editor of has become a marketing tool, though a highly contentious one, Luxury Society Thailand, an online community for the affluent

Spreading

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by ana g kalaw / illustrations by terawat teankaprasith

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for many fashion brands. It’s not enough to be just labels sold in a boutique. Brands now want to be known as purveyors of a complete lifestyle experience. Designers are no longer just providing clothing or It bags; they are also creating emotions, styling lives and serving experiences. “Diversification is rarely a driver, more a potential benefit,” James Lawson, director of London-based luxury-market research specialists Ledbury Research, said at the 2010 Reuters Global Luxury Summit. For these big-name brands, the ultimate benefit is being able to expand their empire beyond fashion and accessories, hopefully increasing brand longevity.

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branch out. S.T. Dupont, the French company that also specialises in writing instruments and luxurious masculine knick-knacks, tried to venture into ready-to-wear. The extension plunged the company into loss and had to be shut down a few years after it was launched.

Italian fashion house Missoni also ended a diversification into the hospitality industry when it recently checked out of a partnership with Radisson Hotels. Until June of this year, the popular brand had colourful, festively decorated hotels in Edinburgh and Kuwait.

Both parties cited “different long-term business strategies.”

Flop tales such as these prove that the consumer, though sometimes impressionable, is not completely naïve. Fashion offers an emotional benefit and it is quite easy for a consumer to lose trust in a brand once they realise they are not being afforded the same standard of quality and positive imaging initially promised by a beloved label.

Diversification and designer DNA The most successful designer diversifications, however, make sure that the roots and philosophy behind a brand are kept intact, and that brand DNA is still seen in every single creative output. This is the reason why all the Luxury by way of lipstick Armani hotels maintain an aesthetic that is To manage both risk and expectation, many as sleek and swanky as the clothes the brand brands find that the easiest – and least precarious previews every fashion week. Or why the People like to – path to diversification is via fragrances and home furnishings produced by Ralph Lauren, show who they cosmetics. Chanel pioneered the trend in 1921 from the plush beddings to monogrammed are and their when it unveiled Chanel N°5, still one of the bathroom towels to small accents, evoke the preferences. To most beloved fragrances today. Makeup, a series All-American rustic elegance the brand has own a luxury of lip colour and powders, followed three years become known for. item makes one later. Today, the brand’s signature black lacquer The challenge for a luxury brand is to be feel part of an casing dominates the beauty departments of relevant while still capturing the designer’s elite group. the most prestigious stores worldwide. Even its ethos and unique self-expression. Roberto nail polish, another successful brand extension, Cavalli, known for his exotic rock-star introduced much later, has a serious following, flamboyance, wouldn’t do well promoting a with some shades even requiring a waitlist. fine-dining establishment. A club – extravagant, Other luxury brands such as YSL and excessive and shod in animal-print opulence – Christian Dior enjoy the same success with would be more up his alley, hence the Cavalli their cosmetics and fragrance lines as they do Club, entertainment lounges and establishments with their apparel and fashion accessories. Each of these brands has in some of the most renowned party capitals, such as Miami and at least one product that enjoys cult status among beauty junkies.

Ibiza.

Makeup and perfume are an easy sell for these brands. These There are limits to how far a luxury company can diversify its flanker products, as they are called by retail insiders, were initially operations without diluting its brand philosophy or confusing its produced as further temptations to an already existing consumer patrons. According to Tardivel, “Diversification into new areas base. But in the last few years, fashion houses have discovered – which you do not really master can be risky even if the brand is or have been discovered by – a new market eager to lap up the well-established.” Louis Vuitton and Hermès’ recent move into cosmetics and perfume extensions bearing luxury tags: the minted high-end jewellery fit both brands’ exclusive reputations and haute middle-class. couture backgrounds. Eyebrows lifted, however, when German “Affordable luxury” has been a pertinent buzzword as of late. brand Montblanc, known for making pens and men’s accessories, The rise of the middle class, now more knowledgeable about branched out into fine jewellery in 2005. After a few design shifts, designer brands and du jour labels, largely because of the Internet, Montblanc’s silver, gold and diamond pieces found a niche market has sparked the interest of a new breed of designers who recognise in Asia and in Europe; jewellery reportedly now represents 20 that this demographic is willing to spend a little bit more for even percent of the company’s business. a tiny slice of luxury. As luxury-goods sales slow, beauty products For every successful launch, however, there is a failure. The are becoming the bait for attracting these aspirational consumers, luxury industry is also full of examples of botched attempts to

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particularly in emerging markets such as Asia. “Fragrances and being perceived as too accessible, thereby losing their exclusive, cosmetics are the luxury of the masses,” Exane BNP Paribas aspirational appeal. Sometimes, by expanding its girth, a luxury analyst Luca Solca once said in an interview. label can spread itself too thin. The challenge now for Marc Marc Jacobs is at the forefront of the “masstige,” or prestige Jacobs, Dolce and Gabbana, and Burberry is to make the most of for the masses, revolution. Dubbed the “king of diversification,” their luxury heritage without losing their top-level reputation and the prolific designer knows by experience that there are tons of affluent clientele. Brands such as Chanel and Dior have managed women who are willing to drop some cash for lipstick bearing his quite well, ably purveying haute couture and mascara alongside label if they can’t afford to pick up his Incognito satchel. Jacobs’ scientific skincare, sunglasses and costume jewellery. Brands like previous encounters with aspiring middle-class consumers resulted Pierre Cardin, however, fell victim to over-licensing and excessive in astounding sales for his diffusion line Marc by Marc Jacobs, his diversification. various fragrances (Daisy and, most recently, Honey, are bestsellers) Once a reputed fashion house known for its bubble dress design and for other flanker products, personal effects such as key chains, in the fifties, Pierre Cardin’s fall from the luxe ladder started when he agreed to attach his name to virtually phone casings and costume jewellery. anything, including crockery, car-seat covers, The American designer put together a makeup cars, restaurants, knitting wool and pens. line and, in late 2013, debuted it through He also extensively sold his ready-to-wear Sephora stores (it reached Bangkok in May). line in department stores, branching out with The designer then promptly put up a standalone dress shirts, belts, and boxed handkerchief beauty store at Bleecker Street in New York. sets. The merchandising mishmash became so Just like his apparel, Jacobs’ gel eyeliners and The challenge confusing it soon tarnished Cardin’s reputation lip lacquers are fun, edgy and just a teensy bit for a luxury and cheapened his brand. Consumers couldn’t cheeky. To garner some more buzz, Jacobs figure out the brand’s core product anymore, introduced 64-year-old Jessica Lange as the brand is to be and it seemed like neither could the designer. face of Marc Jacobs earlier this year. Combined relevant while Eventually, Pierre Cardin was relegated to touches of marketing genius, proper pricing and still capturing department-store anonymity; it became a attractive packaging once again proved lucrative the designer’s brand with recall but barely any influence. for the brand, attracting both ardent fans and new ethos and Although it can be argued that the designer followers. unique selfhas made piles of money from granting too Other fashion houses that have successfully expression. many licenses, he did so at the risk of losing diversified into cosmetics – and taken advantage his status. of the higher spending propensity of the middle Diversifying into lifestyle products beyond class – include Dolce and Gabbana, who took shoes, bags and apparel is now a key way on noted makeup artist Pat McGrath as creative for designers to grow their brand, although a advisor, and Burberry. The British brand, agog balanced combination of the right product and over the success of its makeup and fragrance the right approach is still required. Expanding a and Burberry Body lines, is, in fact, planning brand is not solely reliant on innovation or marketing gimmickry. to launch a skincare line sometime next year. Some would say Top brands need to always offer an experience that is unique yet that lip glow and bronzer is a huge step away from trench coats still ultimately familiar. and umbrellas, but the venture has proven to be quite lucrative for “For a true luxury brand to stay ahead of the game, it needs Burberry. (It’s relevant to mention that the makeup packaging does to bring the focus back to itself. To its core values and identities, bear the brand’s signature check pattern.) The brand put up a store and all the while create new codes of luxury,” said Sophie in bustling Covent Garden dedicated just to their beauty line, and Maxwell, insight director at design consultancy firm Pearlfisher, it probably won’t be long until the standalone concept comes to in an interview with LuxurySociety.com. The reason a brand such Asia. Dolce and Gabbana, on the other hand, is hoping to display its as Hermès has become so effective at diversifying, whether it’s cosmetics line at airport duty-free shops. with bags, scarves, jewellery or porcelain plates, is because it has refused to let go of its founding standards: focused marketing, The cost of excessive expansion distinctive designs and excellent craftsmanship. Luxury is an Retail experts warn that brands can only go so far in maximising experience, after all, a memorable one, both for those who can the potential of the mass market. One of the challenges for readily afford it and for those who aspire to it. luxury brands heavily into the diversification game is the risk of

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Looped and unlooped Thai letters by Cadson Demak.

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Thaipography This month the spotlight falls on the Thai-ness of Thai fonts. by philip cornwel-smith

o loop or not to loop? That is the question typographers face when making a new Thai font. It’s a design decision, but one that twangs a tension in Thai identity. Making Thai letters without loops opens up possibilities for new creativity, commerce and connections, but upsets defenders of Thai-ness. A font menu may seem as playful as the filters on Instagram, yet it’s a battlefront in the Thai culture wars.

Is Thai script being colonised and losing uniqueness to alien forms and standards? Are bilingual fonts a doormat for multinationals, or a sign of respect amid interest in non-Latin fonts? Does computing kill lettering craft or liberate Thai typographers? Are loopless fonts un-Thai?

“Everything in Thai typography is a big issue!” exclaims Anuthin Wongsunkakon, creator of the type foundry Cadson Demak, which means “Great Selection.” “It’s an open landscape and needs a lot of landfill.”

Typography is certainly topical; it’s also one of our hippest jobs. “Thais don’t just want to be designers; they want to be typographers,” says Pracha Suveeranont, who made the landmark book and exhibition Gaeroi Dua Pim Thai (Tracing Thai Typefaces). “Typographers are the rock stars of graphic design.”

Anuthin is Thailand’s font-spotter superstar. Through Cadson Demak, he has pioneered custom typeface as a new industry, represents the design giants Monotype, Linotype and Font Shop, and made the legendary

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fonts Helvetica and Frutiger speak Thai. He has taught for 15 years, currently at Bangkok and Chulalongkorn universities, runs national campus tours, is making four books (three drawn from Anuthin.org) and organises the Bangkok International Typographic Symposium (BITS).

Font groupies will pause their kerning activities from November 14th to 16th and flock to the 4th annual BITS. Soon after Bangkok hosted Granshan, the international conference on non-Latin typefaces, BITS has expanded to a day of workshops at TCDC, plus 12 speakers over two days at the BACC, including the lauded Georg Seifert and Bruno Maag, plus a Type Walk guided tour of Bangkok signage. To coincide, TCDC will stage Thailand’s first exhibition by the Type Directors Club of New York.

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Anuthin Wongsunkakon of Cadson Demak.

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Frutiger rendered in Thai as both looped and loopless by Cadson Demak.

พลานุภาพและอนุภาพ

บรรษัทภิบาลคือเข็มทิศการดำเนินธุรกิจ

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อันดับหนึ่งแห่งอาเชียนอธิบดีกรมสรรพสามิตมานะพยายามเส้นสายลายมือ พัฒนามาเป็นฟอนต์แอปพลิเคชัน

เอกราชมหานครคอนกรีต การรักษาดินแดนส่วนใหญ่ของชาติเอาไว้

ฟอนต์ภาษาไทยสำหรับ

แจกและแจงพ.ศ. ๒๕๒๙ สุราปรุงพิเศษ มาตรฐานสากลพบวิศวกรผู้เชี่ยวชาญ เขี ยนไทยให้สนุกเปิดให้บริการโทรศัพท์เคลื่อนที่ เมืองหลวงแห่งวัฒนธรรม นวัตกรรมซีแพคปรากฏการณ์แบบฉบับปรับปรุงใหมจรดด้วยเส้นปากกาสองแบบที่แตกต่าง ฝรั่งเศสยื่นคำขาดให้รัฐบาลไทย นิตยสาร วอลเปเปอร์ ไทยเอดิชั่น

การเดินทางบนเส้นขนาน

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ฟอนตที่เราๆคุนเคย หลังจากผานไปหนึ่ง

เพื่อติดต่อกับระบบเครือข่าย

เทคโนโลยี

ผลิตภัณฑ์สุขุมวิทปรับเข้าหาสแกนดิเนเวียน ผสมเสร็ จ ดิจิตอลมัลติมีเดีย นับเป็นเวลากว่า ๕๘ ปี

อักขรศิลป์

เหตุการณ์ความขัดแย้งออกแบบมาเฉพาะเพื่อสนองการจัดวาง

มาตรฐาน

การกลับมาอีกครั้งของ

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ระดับเพดานของการจัดเก็บภาษี

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สัมพันธภาพทางการออกแบบคุณลักษณะเด่นของเครื่องลูกข่ายที่มีขนาดเล็ก จากกรุงเทพฯ ไปทางทิศตะวันออกของประเทศเลือกใช้ลูกลื่น หรือ หมึกซึม

มติที่ประชุมกรรมการบริหารด้านรัฐกิจลายเสนสะอาดกวาบนเสนทาง

เอทิลแอลกอฮอล์

เสียงสนับสนุนเป็นเอกฉันท์

ความคิดไหลลื่น

Font families by Cadson Demak.

Such world-class independent events – plus TCDC’s Creativities Unfold and last month’s Creative Bangkok symposium – reveal who’s nurturing eager Thai talent.

“Students learn more about typography on apps,” Pracha says.

“Thai educators are far behind, just learning how to use type, not to build it.”

This year, Pairoj Teeraprapa (aka Roj Siamruay) won a Silpathorn Award for his retro lettering via his former brand SiamRuay. Five years ago a Silpathorn Award went to Parinya Rojanaarayanon from Thailand’s first digital type foundry, Dear Book (DB).

Typography didn’t always get extra-bold headlines. “A decade ago public awareness was zero,” Anuthin says. “We had typography, but the foundries weren’t connected or recognised internationally. We wanted to set up a standard for Thai typefaces to match with the rest of the world.”

Frankly, Thai typefaces often don’t match with each other, let alone with logos, translations or bilingual layouts. Much local advertising, print and especially website design jars the eye with discordant fonts. “Up till 2000, I thought Thai graphics

were a disaster,” Anuthin says.

“Everywhere the same look, very messy and bitty. So many clashing fonts.”

Layout has improved, yet most Thai magazines have an English name and Thai articles with headlines in English.

“Thai designers look at English typography as a form, but they don’t look at Thai letters as a form; they look at Thai letters as words,” Anuthin observes.

“They want to look international, look modern. It’s ironic that they actually deny what’s genuinely modern: a Thai typeface that can do that job.” ypography may seem a subtle detail, but it has important practical and cultural roles. “The fundamental duty of a typeface is to communicate,” Pracha told the Bangkok Post. “Its presence must be silent, even if it has to carry a loud message.” Readers may notice type only when it goes wrong, if it confuses them, tires the eye, hides warnings in small print, or can’t be deciphered as you speed past a billboard.

Letters also make words visible, which is as basic to culture as it gets. Typography is part of literacy.

Now that handwriting is rare, a font

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Poster for the David Carson workshop at this month’s BITS.

French type designer Jean Francois Pachez speaking at the first BITS.

Press materials from the Bangkok International Typography Symposium (BITS).

projects the voice and tone of the text, and projects an identity, whether of a blog, a brand or a country.

“Typography is important in representing national uniqueness,” emphasises Roj. “We have our own nation and our own letters. Thai fonts indicate Thai-ness.”

Then there is Thai taste. “We like glitzy, busy stuff. A lot of detail,” Anuthin says. “We have to make the impression that we put a lot of sweat into it.” And in Thai aesthetics a grace of line melds script into lai Thai patterns and sacred yantra diagrams.

“Everybody appreciates beauty,” Roj says. “Car plates got a lot of complaints until the government improved the design. When designers pay more attention to typography, then our society can fill with beauty rather than junk.”

Thai script is a beautiful thing, with its hooks, tails, swoops, zigzags, and marks above and below.

But typographers often see quirks as problems that need to be solved.

Loops fill up when made bold.

Uprights can overlap vowels. Loops push the narrow script taller, forcing

body text to be smaller yet on bigger leading than in other scripts.

This wastes space, strains eyes and unbalances the texture in bilingual text. So does the lack of word gaps.

“I look at fonts as data,” Anuthin says. “So it’s our job to translate that code into a language readable to humans.” One aim in all this is to create “font families”: one style from extra-light to ultra-bold, plus italics, webfonts, or even dotted. Making fonts multi-weight is not only tricky, but used to be expensive, and a lack of font families is one reason layouts got messy. Designers had to pick different fonts for headline, subhead, body-text, caption, boxes.

The choice was a serviceable match or a jarring clash, rarely an integrated whole. Designers grew up seeing that pick’n’mix workaround as the norm, but font families will enable more harmonious layouts.

Thai has very little choice – mostly display fonts with barely a dozen common body-text fonts – and half of all fonts are copies

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or tweaks. No copyright protection for type led firms like DB to suffer from stealing and recycling. Though another foundry, PSL, successfully sued some pirates, copyright remains an issue. Those off-the-shelf retail foundries charge little upfront, but patrol the media to charge fees on prominent usage. Cadson Demak, which focuses on custom commissions, chose the international norm of a one-off fee.

Owning your own font is akin to a logo, a uniform, or any other mark of identity. It makes the voice of a brand authentic, consistent and recognisable. Thailand’s custom font revolution began when all three telecom firms – Worldphone,

Orange and AIS – each had the same typeface. Only colour set them apart.

AIS wanted its own voice and Pracha Suveeranont, then at its ad agency SC Matchbox, hired Anuthin to design SMB Advance, which remains in use.

During Thailand’s political strife, all three Thaksinite parties maintained their identity using custom typography. History might have been different if they’d chosen a looped font, but keeping certain strokes identical proved how consistent letterforms spark instant recall.

By contrast, after the 2014 coup, the Free Thai organisation set up by exiles evoked the post-1932 era by using one of Roj’s fonts. Roj – who’d

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Hot metal type from the exhibition and book by Pracha Suveeranont, ‘Tracing Thai Typefaces.’

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What is Thai?

Is what I do Thai enough?

Does it reflect what people need or want?

say the rest of world will have to follow our standard. It doesn’t happen that way.”

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designed Fah Thai font for the antiYingluck protests – demanded they stop using FahTalaiJone, which is Thailand’s most downloaded free font. Observers recalled Johnny Marr forbidding UK Prime Minister David Cameron from saying he was a fan of The Smiths. As well as proving the power of type, this contretemps shows a key difference between free fonts and custom fonts: control.

Some good fonts are free for altruistic reasons, but most are either hobbyist display fonts that lack delicacy and durability, or sample fonts to promote designers.

Serious clients will pay for tailored, stress-tested font families that are multilingual. It’s already common to see Thai beside English, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Arabic, while India and three quarters of ASEAN people use Latin scripts. “If a Thai brand wants to cover Southeast Asia, naturally they need the same voice in every country,” Anuthin says. “That requires the same typeface with

‘Thai Identity from Thai to Thai Thai’ by Pracha Suveeranont.

different letterforms.”

One way is to fit Thai into common fonts like Frutiger. In an ingenious win-win solution, Neue Frutiger Thai comes in looped and loopless versions that preserve the original font’s feel. The other way is to make original Thai fonts work for multiple scripts, such as Cadson Demak’s Anuparp and Ut Sa Ha Gumm. At stake is whether Thai culture benefits more by separation or by projecting its voice. “How many people actually speak Thai?” Anuthin asks. “We are a minority. You can’t

hat makes a Thai font Thai?

Maybe the details: loops, thin monoline strokes, lai Thai swirls? Or the mode: official, craftsy, decorative? Does ethnicity of the designer matter? If a heritage style, then which? Type has constantly evolved, yet in the “golden age” view of history, innovation gets seen as decline.

“Many factors contribute to the creation, proliferation or stagnation of a typeface,” Pracha told the

Bangkok Post about his 2002 book and exhibition. He explored ten key Thai fonts, from the first done by US missionary Dan Beach Bradley in 1841 to the three copyright-free “National Fonts” designated by NECTEC in 2001. “By tracing its history, we can understand a lot about the political or technological changes that influenced different eras… how missionaries, bureaucrats, merchants and job-printers play crucial roles, and that designer is only a recent occupation.”

Among the National Fonts, Kinnaree is actually a variant of DB Narai, which updated a 1913 schoolbook font by the missionary Assumption Press called Farang Ses. “Most Thai-style fonts are just an imitation of what job printers already did during the decorative type revival in the 1950s and the 1960s dry-transfer period,” Pracha adds. “It typifies the craze for Thai-ness since the 1990s.”

“We are still unclear on the definition of ‘Thai’ and who are ‘Thai people’,” says Roj. “We learnt that King Ramkhamhaeng invented the Thai alphabet, but this causes a problem in linking his alphabet to Thai – which are quite different.”

From fragments we can tell that Sukhothai script was basically loopless. Between the 14th to 17th centuries, Thai script truncated redundant parts of letters into loops.

So truncating loops into curls is part of a long trend.

The book of the exhibition ‘Tracing Thai Typefaces’ by Pracha Suveeranont.

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Ultimately, the script itself derives from India via Mon, Khmer and other influences. Printing, typewriters, hot metal, transfers, photo-typesetting and desktop publishing, too, were all imports. As with most cultural hybrids, the Thai-ness likely comes in the process of adapting.

“As a Thai designer, I use fonts as a tool to represent Thai style as I interpret it,” Roj explains. “I initiated this to prove my hypothesis: whether the Thainess I cooked-up myself would suit the public taste.” The look caught on and Roj made movie titles for Naresuan and the films of Wisit Sasanatieng, famously SR FahTalaiJone. “It gives a classic Thai feeling, so it’s widely used in vintage markets.”

Roj has designed loopless fonts like BAY for Bank of Ayutthaya, but keeps lettering craft alive. Many of his fonts are hand-drawn, from the masculine JickhoArtDi (meaning

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e r e

&

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BadBoy) to the casual SR Rogee.

“Some Thai designers work on Latin font design. Those can’t be counted as Thai fonts,” Roj declares.

“I have no idea why Thai people like to brownnose Westerners even though we have good things at hand.

This is a sad story of my nation.”

Those anxious of Thai being colonised point to ร (ror rua) being rendered like an ‘s,’ or ล (lor ling) like an ‘a.’ “Tempting as it is to consider the loopless style as Latinised, isn’t it more important to relate it to local context and history?” asks font designer Ben Mitchell on his website, The Fontpad. “Thai typographers equate the loops to serifs, since they seem to be a discretionary detail and are presumed to aid readability… [but] unlike serifs, the loops have semiotic significance.” Loops differentiate similar letters. He also notes how

Prairoj Teeraprapa in his pioneering shop Siamruay.

Roj Siamruay’s font SR FahTalaiJone for the film of that name.

Siamruay graphics by Prairoj Teeraprapa.

Thai looks closer to Latin than other Indic scripts, even Greek, so some lookalikes aren’t surprising when abstracting their form.

Mitchell also notices that the brisk, economic strokes of handwriting omit loops and twiddly bits. “Effectively Thai can be seen to have branched into a style for reading (looped) and a style for writing (loopless).” So the propriety around loops may be partly that loopless looks too informal to be endorsed as Thai.

“What is Thai? Is what I do Thai enough? Does it reflect what people need or want?” Anuthin asks. “I always go back to the point that if you don’t recognise pop culture, then you just don’t have anything to represent yourself in the current world. Why do we have to wait 20 years to recognise what happened today? You don’t have to wait that long. Times have already changed and if you don’t integrate, then the only option is to leave

yourself behind.”

Young typographers aren’t waiting; they’re creating.

Innovative Thai fonts pop up in TCDC’s Ploy Saeng showcases, foundries like SuperstoreFont. com, and projects like “I am a Thai Graphic Designer.”

Just as Thais make Latin fonts, foreigners draw Thai fonts, too.

Briton Ben Mitchell created the first trilingual Thai-Burmese-Latin face, Lumen, with loops, serifs and calligraphic strokes.

Typography embodies the Thainess debate between prescription and description.

Cultural exceptionalists order topdown limits. Creatives interpret cultural flows from the bottomup, letting the genius loci emerge organically. The historical interplay of both strands has forged this hybrid culture. Now that design is programming, and anyone anywhere can make fonts, Thai type has the means to break out of this loop. The only limits to Thai typography are Thai cultural limits to expression.

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THE BIG CHILL “Winter City” is becoming a sought-after tag, and Edmonton’s happy with it. by keith mundy

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Edmonton’s skyline with lights illuminating buildings.

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ou like to chill, don’t you?

Most people do, now and again. Minus-20 okay for you?

That’s what it gets down to on many winter days in Edmonton, the capital of Canada’s Alberta province, the one that lies just east of the Rockies. From November to March, and often longer, snow blankets the city, and Edmontonians go into subzero survival mode.

Alberta is one of Canada’s three Prairie provinces, and Edmonton lies near the far northern end of those great grasslands of North America, in an area originally inhabited by the Cree and Blackfoot tribes. It began life as a trading post of the Hudson Bay Company in the late 18th century, doing business with the First Nations, as Canadians call the Amerindian peoples who first inhabited Canada.

Long the back of beyond, Edmonton was only significantly settled by Europeans in the late 19th century. Pierre Trudeau, that coolest of prime ministers who gave Canada a sophisticated image back in the 1970s, looked out from the eastern comfort of the national capital in Ottawa and once said of Alberta’s capital, “It’s not the end of the earth but you can see it from there.”

That didn’t go down too well with Edmontonians, who are generally conservative and didn’t much vote for the Liberal standard-bearer that Trudeau was. Out here folks get on with business, which these days has much more to do with oil and gas than with corn and cattle, as it did in the old days of the Prairies. Alberta has massive oil and gas reserves, the second-largest in the world after Saudi Arabia’s, and Edmonton does a lot of the supplies and services for the industry, as well as being one of Canada’s premier technological research and education centres.

After a short and often hot summer when Edmontonians can actually be fine in just one layer of clothing, Edmonton gets back to its more persistent reality of being

After a short and often hot summer when Edmontonians can actually be fine in just one layer of clothing, Edmonton gets back to its more persistent reality of being a chilly winter city.

a chilly winter city where thermal underwear is a must. Minus-20 degrees Celsius is a frequent condition, and it regularly gets worse, too, falling below that for an average of 28 days in each snow-clad, icepaved winter.

So if you like to shiver and slither, come on over. Or preferably take a few tips from the locals on how to negotiate the conditions, and really enjoy them without getting frostbite, hypothermia or broken bones. Last November, as winter settled in, a contributor to the Edmonton Journal told readers “how to survive the Edmonton winter.”

First came what to wear. “If you’re going to be outside for any period of time, plan what you’re going to wear very carefully. At last, when you’re sure you’ll be warm, add one scarf and two extra layers.”

And definitely wear a tuque. This is Canadian for what most of us call a beanie, or a woolly hat, or a bobble hat if it’s got a little ball on top. Even if you hate them, wear one. Your ears will be thankful.

Next came some crucial tips on locomotion: Learn the Edmonton Crouch. “When it’s icy out and a new snow falls so that a thin layer of

A park bench and trees on a foggy Alberta morning.

snow covers that ice, the sidewalks of our city are killers or, at least, bone breakers and butt bruisers.

You’re headed for a fall if you don’t change the way you walk. My advice is to walk like you’re skating. Bend your knees a bit, get your butt down like you’re sitting in a chair, get into what is called ‘hockey stance’ in arenas around the city. Your stability will improve, as will your mobility.

Yes, you will look silly. Surviving winter is 50 percent about sacrificing looking good in order to stay warm and stay safe.”

Most scarily, he warns us off tall buildings. “Stay away from large downtown skyscrapers. The windchill off of them will instantly freeze and peel your skin, as if you were a naked and blistered banana on the tundra.”

In downtown Edmonton, a city of a million people with a typical North American central business district of high-rise office towers, this is a tough order. Best seek the open spaces, then, especially Churchill Square, the city’s focal public space, where you find the modern City Hall whose

fountain becomes a skating rink in winter. Your eye will also be caught by the Art Gallery of Alberta, whose façade of angular windows framed by a winding steel ribbon references the swirling forms of the Aurora Borealis, or northern lights, which can sometimes be seen from the city.

With the Francis Winspear Centre for Music, the Citadel Theatre and the Stanley A. Milner Library also facing the square, this is the cultural centre of Edmonton.

To be less formal and more hip, as well as far removed from those perilous skyscrapers that might freeze you to the spot, head for the alternative Whyte Avenue district, near the University of Alberta campus, lined with century-old – that’s really old for Edmonton – brick buildings that don’t venture above three storeys. This is what passes for bohemia in Edmonton, with many quirky shops and cafes, plus an art, music and theatre scene. Some of the many buskers who play the area in summer will still be bravely around, in this sparkiest of neighbourhoods.

But if you just want to completely

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The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights.

Your eye will also be caught by the Art Gallery of Alberta, whose faรงade of angular windows framed by a winding steel ribbon references the swirling forms of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, which can sometimes be seen from the city.

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A couple cross-country skiing.

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chicken out and stay indoors, then the biggest indoors in the Americas is waiting for you at West Edmonton Mall. Dominated by the Amerindian tribes until well into the 19th century, Edmonton is today home to the biggest mega-mall in the whole of the Americas. The Cree and Blackfoot had been there for at least 5,000 years, and now the shopping tribes are in charge. So it goes.

The continent’s largest shopping and entertainment complex, West Edmonton Mall offers over 800 stores if you actually want to shop, and more than 100 eateries for when you want to eat. When you do, remember that the best thing for keeping you warm is fatty foods, as those hardy far northern Canadians called Inuit by the politically correct, or Eskimos by the non-politically correct, well know, scarfing seal blubber all winter in their great frozen wilderness.

But more important is all the family fun. You’ll find the world’s largest indoor amusement park with 25 rides and attractions, a giant water park with wave pools and

mega-slides, and an indoor lake with bumper boats armed with water guns, as well as performing sea lions and other things that will make you forget that the great outdoors exists.

And it goes on into the night with 21 cinemas, a Las Vegas-style casino and a dinner-theatre club, 365 days a year.

But this is cheating on a grand scale. When it snows, snows, snows, you really should get out in the white stuff, preferably toting some snowshoes, ice skates or skis. And Edmonton does great things to help you.

The most remarkable feature of this city, the one that makes it unique amongst North American cities, is the great swathe of greenery which virtually cuts the urban area in two.

Edmonton’s river valley constitutes the longest stretch of connected urban parkland in North America.

Twenty-two times larger than New York’s Central Park, the river valley is home to various parks ranging from fully serviced urban parks to wild spaces.

This immense “Ribbon of Green”

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is supplemented by numerous neighbourhood parks located throughout the city, to give a total of 111-square-kilometres of parkland. The city also offers many bike and walking trails. Within the 7,400 hectare, 25-kilometre stretch of the river valley park system, there are 11 lakes, 14 ravines and 22 major parks.

That’s a lot of bountiful space for winter activities in the snow, and a lot of ice blanketing the greenery, making fun out of nature’s winter gift. The river valley in particular is an excellent cross-country skiing location, making a great way to see the city’s wilderness in all its crystalline beauty. Trails stretch from Goldbar Park to Goldstick Park and designated trails are lit at night for after-dark skiing.

You can even do downhill skiing within the city. The river

valley boasts two alpine ski hills at Snow Valley and Edmonton Ski Club, which are great for both beginners and experienced skiers. Just outside the city limits, Sun Ridge Ski Area and Rabbit Hill Snow Resort offer even better skiing opportunities. In the wilder parkland areas, or outside the city, snowshoeing, the mode of winter locomotion for the First Nations, is the most practical way to travel on deep snow, off the beaten track.

Snowboarding opportunities abound in the parks, while for those with no winter-sports skills there are simple delights like snow tubing — sliding downhill on big fat inner tubes — at Sunridge Park and tobogganing at several locations with safe run-outs, safety signs and reduced hazards.

Skaters have numerous choices of indoor and outdoor skating rinks, even in the heart of the city in front of City Hall. You can enjoy freestyle skating

Two horses eating in frosty Strathcona County.

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EDMONTON FACT FILE Flights Star Alliance airlines ANA (www.ana.co.jp) and Asiana (flyasiana.com) connect Bangkok with Edmonton, via Tokyo or Seoul and Vancouver.

Hotels Fairmont Hotel Macdonald, 10065 100th Street; Tel: +1 780 424 5181 www.fairmont.com Once part of a luxurious railway hotel chain, this historic hotel is preserved in regal glory with Italian marble, ornate chandeliers and plush carpets.

Union Bank Inn, 10053 Jasper Ave; Tel. +1 780 423 3600 www.unionbankinn.com Housed in a former bank building dating from 1910, this elegant boutique hotel features in-room fireplaces to ward off the winter.

Dining & Drinking Three Boars Eatery, 8424 109th Street; Tel. +1 780 757 2600 www.threeboars.ca.

Part of the burgeoning farm-totable food movement, offering small plates of items like pork terrine and smoked quail, plus microbrews on tap and a cool local ambience.

Yellowhead Brewery 10229 105th Street NW; www.yellowheadbrewery. com A tasting room next to a microbrewery where you can quaff Yellowhead lager brewed in the vats visible through a glass partition.

Brewery tours if booked in advance.

Activities Edmonton Tourism’s website at exploreedmonton.com has 72 things to do in fall and winter.

A frozen lake.

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The most remarkable feature of this city, the one that makes it unique among North American cities, is the great swathe of greenery which virtually cuts the urban area in two. It’s the longest stretch of urban parkland in North America.

or take figure-skating lessons, or indulge in the truly Canadian pastime of shinny. An informal kind of ice hockey played by pickup teams on any sizeable ice surface, shinny can be enjoyed by anybody: as long as you have skates and a stick, you can have a go.

Of course, the Canadian winter sport par excellence is ice hockey, which for Canadians is so important it’s called simply “hockey,” the other kind played on grass being the one held at arm’s length with the name of “field hockey.” Some might prefer to call it “ice mayhem,” such is the crunching high-speed physicality of this game, Canada’s official national winter sport, enjoying perennially immense popularity, in Edmonton and elsewhere throughout Canada.

The local professional team is the Edmonton Oilers, whose glory days were in the 1980s when they won

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The Legislative Assembly of Alberta.

the Stanley Cup, North American ice hockey’s top trophy, five times.

Playing in the National Hockey League of North America (NHL), the sport’s highest level, their home arena is the 17,000-seat Rexall Place in the Northlands district, where one or more home games can be seen most weeks from late September to mid-April.

In the downtown area, events and festivals proliferate as the temperature drops lower and lower, with the fairy tale atmosphere of Candy Cane Lane leading up to Christmas and January bringing the Deep Freeze festival on Alberta Avenue just as Whyte Avenue does its Ice On Whyte Festival where top ice sculptors from around the world chisel SUV-sized ice cubes into glassy, iridescent masterpieces.

Ice hockey game being played inside West Edmonton Mall.

dmonton experienced its first boom in the 1890s after the railway came and prospectors heading for the Yukon Territory to Alberta’s north flooded in during the Yukon Gold Rush. They say 100,000 came. In fact, just 30,000

arrived in the Klondike gold fields, and just 4,000 actually struck gold. It was tough up there in the Yukon, a frigid area which, on one February night in 1947, recorded the lowest temperature on earth: -63°C. Edmonton is balmy by comparison. Historically, the city’s temperature has occasionally dipped down to the -40s, but the typical average low in winter is only -10. Only! That’s the kind of thing that Edmontonians like to say to those of us from warmer climes, relishing our horror at the thought of anything near zero, let alone well below it.

But never think the locals are equivalent to polar bears, revelling in the iciness of their natural habitat no matter what, enjoying their winter frolics without a care, because our advisor from the Edmonton Journal has the following kindly counsel: “Never once complain about how cold it is to anyone else. Believe me, they know. They freakin’ know. So shut up about it.”

photo: ©corbis / profile

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WINTER CITIES They might not be the first winter wonderlands that come to mind, but these cities’ relative obscurity makes them all the more ideal as snowy destinations.

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Harbin

Located in China’s far northeast region formerly known as Manchuria, the capital and largest city of Heilongjiang province, Harbin suffers the most bitterly cold winters among major Chinese cities and even calls itself the Ice City. Founded as recently as 1898 with the coming of the Trans-Manchurian Railway, Harbin first prospered through the influx of refugees fleeing turmoil in Russia. In the 1920s, the city was considered the fashion capital of China, since new styles from Paris and Moscow reached Harbin before they ever hit Shanghai.

Today Harbin has a metropolitan population of over 10 million and is the economic and communications hub of northeast China. Profiting from the intense cold, it stages the Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival each January, using crystal-clear ice cut from the frozen Songhua River which traverses the city.

With an average temperature of -19.7°C in winter, the city is beautified with ice sculptures from December all the way through to March.

Innsbruck

Helsinki

From November to March, Finland’s capital city is in the grip of winter, and the first snowfall makes the city look picture-perfect.

Europe’s second-most northerly capital suffers temperatures in the deep winter of December to February averaging -4°C. The coldest time is usually late January, when temperatures can fall below -15°C. Then the city is covered by snow, and the Baltic Sea waters which lap its shores usually freeze over. The lowest temperature ever recorded was -34.3°C, in 1987.

If the winter is sufficiently cold, the splendid Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis that can often be seen in northern Finland put on a colourful show in Helsinki. A wonderful place to escape the cold is the Winter Garden, founded in 1893, with its heated glasshouses filled with exotic plants. Inside you are in the tropics, looking out on a winter wonderland.

Surrounded by Alpine peaks, Innsbruck is a place where winter sports meet urban flair. A 15th-century Habsburg emperor set up his court in this Austrian city and his legacy is a maze of Gothic and Baroque architecture, its cobbled lanes highlighted with grand churches and an imperial palace.

And wherever you turn in winter, there are the snow-clad mountains, with cable cars to the ski slopes actually starting in the city.

The capital of the Tyrol, Austria’s mountain region, Innsbruck is a lively city with a big student population, boasting trendy bars as well as cosy Konditorei (candy shop). Deep winter is lived in below-zero temperatures, enlivened with a host of ice and snow activities. In town, the Olympiaworld complex includes ice halls, an outdoor ice rink and a bobsleigh run. At the Nordpark located above the city, snowboarders ride the challenging Skylinepark and Superpipe. Both skiers and sightseers take the Nordketten cable car to the top of the mountain wall looming over the city’s north side, enjoying breathtaking panoramas.