Autor(en)

Warren, William and Brian Brake:

Verlag / Jahr

Privately Printed., 1968.

Format / Einband

Cloth with transparent sleeve. 87 p.

Sprache

Englisch

Gewicht

ca. 550 g

Bestell-Nr

1238018

Bemerkungen

Slightly soiled, spine faded due to light, clean inside. - THE HOUSE ON THE KLONG A CHARACTERISTIC of Asian cities which has traditionally frustrated Western visitors is their tendency to hide their treasures from public view: to contra- dict, at first glance, their legends of splendor. Generations of travelers have felt, on their introduction to Rangoon or Singapore or Bangkok, as Somerset Maugham did when he made a trip through the Orient in the 1920's: "They are all alike, with their straight streets, their arcades, their tramways, their dust, their blinding sun their dense traffic, their ceaseless din.... They are hard and glittering and as unreal as a backcloth in a musical comedy. They give you nothing. But when you leave them it is with a feeling that you have missed something and you cannot help thinking that they have some secret that they have kept from you." The tendency remains today, though the exteriors of the cities have changed. What bewilders and depresses the present-day visitor is not so much that all Asian cities look alike but that all cities, Asian or otherwise, are similar. Architecture, along with so many other things, has become inter- national, and it is increasingly difficult to tell whether one is in Asia or the West. The real treasures, meanwhile, have become even less visible to the traveler, the secrets a little more difficult to pry out of their glittering guardians. But they are still there, amid all the familiar things, and they have not lost their power to surprise and enchant when discovered. In Bangkok, after sadly noting the city's "dust and heat and noise and whiteness and more dust," Maugham came upon its traditional temple architecture, and before those "incredible buildings" the monotony of the modern city faded away: "They are unlike anything in the world, so that you are taken aback, and you cannot fit them into the scheme of the things you know. It makes you laugh with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this sombre earth.... I do not know that these Siamese wats have beauty, which they say is reserved and aloof and very refined; all I know is that they are strange and gay and odd, their lines are infinitely distinguished, like the lines of a proposition in a schoolboy's Euclid, their colors are flaunting and crude, like the colors of vegetables in the greengrocer's stall at an open-air market, and, like a place where seven ways meet, they open roads down which the imagination can make many a careless and unexpected journey." In Maugham's time, had he looked a little further, down the klongs, or canals, that then threaded through the city, he would have found hundreds of residential buildings in a similar style, the domestic equivalents of the temples, and he would undoubtedly have been just as delighted with them. Today, finding them is not such a simple matter. The temples themselves are still there, as strange and bright as ever behind their thick, protective walls, but it takes a determined visitor to ferret out the old houses in their hiding places, often in the shadow of some massive, commonplace modern structure and just as often suffering from neglect. For this reason, a visitor who comes across James H. W. Thompson's residence, just a block away from the National Stadium, is in a sense doubly rewarded: he has the pleas- ure of finding one of those unexpected treasures in an unlikely place, and he also has a chance to see an example of an architectural form that, if it is not actually dying, is at least certainly threatened by what is usually called progress.

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