2021
84th Anniversary of Triam Udom Suksa School. Thailand’s first coeducational school.
Building 3 (1940), Triam Udom Suksa School. Architect: Ercole Manfredi.
https://www.facebook.com/84thTriamUdomSuksaRenovationProject/videos/938091123738788
Being the last in the series of three buildings built under the People’s Party’s government after the 1932 Revolution, Building 3 was aimed to fulfill the mission of the school (then Preparatory School of Chulalongkorn University) to strengthen and expand higher education in the modernising nation.
The building was one of Thailand’s first educational buildings that not only had a composition of simple and clean forms but also an asymetrical plan. It really broke away from a conventional principle of Classicism.
The long plan, laying in the east-west axis, comprises a row of classrooms accessible from a generously open-and-airy verandah, covered by cantilivered-and-folded plains of concrete ceilings and eaves, on the south side. Rooms at both ends of the building have different functions and express themselves differently in their forms. Such plan also ensure that all classrooms receive prevailing wind from the south and minimise both daily and seasonal heat gain from the west and the south.
Not much records of student life in Building 3 have been found yet, but contemporary accounts about Building 2 of the same school indicating the separation between boys and girls during breaks imply that it must have been the same in this building.
With its forms, space, materials, and uses, Building 3 is an evidence of a chapter in Thailand’s history that always treat progress as both necessary and doubful.
P.S. Ecole Manfredi’s design of the Faculty of Dentistry, Chulalongkorn University, shares many similar features with Building 3.
Edited from Chomchon Fusinpaiboon’s PhD dissertation titled ‘Modernisation of Building: The Transplantation of the Concept of Architecture from Europe to Thailand, 1930s–1950s. https://drfjresearchinfo.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/modernisation-of-building/
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