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M+, Hong Kong, © Sumet Jumsai
Sumet Jumsai 書梅春塞
Presentation model, Bank of Asia Headquarters (now United Overseas Bank Bangkok Headquarters) (1983–1986), Bangkok, Thailand 泰國曼谷亞洲銀行總部（現為大華銀行曼谷總部）（1983–1986）展示模型
1990
In his design for the Bank of Asia Headquarters in Bangkok, the architect Sumet
Jumsai made playful use of a high-tech, anthropomorphic form to signal the
dawn of the age of digital banking. Jumsai met the Bank of Asia’s brief for the
project with a design inspired by his son’s toy robot. The twenty-storey tower—
popularly known as the Robot Building—resembles a blocky, humanoid robot
with two large window ‘eyes’, a glass front, and solid sides dotted with ‘bolts’ in
glass fibre reinforced concrete. With this relatable form, Jumsai reinterprets
influential architect Le Corbusier’s concept of a house as ‘a machine for living in’,
humanising the machine and expressing it as something more than a metaphor.
The project is simultaneously a critique and an embrace of the apparently
arbitrary appropriation of references in postmodern architecture—but it is
not simply a witty theoretical exercise. The staggered robot shape helped the
building to comply with the legal requirement of setting back higher floors to
increase exposure to light and air in the city; the bolts function as operable
window casings, sunshades, and an entrance canopy; and the eyes are made of
reflective glass, with ‘lids’ consisting of metallic louvres through which the city
can be viewed from the office’s boardroom.
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