Vantage point

Kulapat Yantrasast plays all the angles with Dib Bangkok, Thailand's first international contemporary art museum

- DAVEN WU

When the LA-based Thai architect Kulapat Yantrasast first toured the 1980s warehouse that would become Thailand’s first international contemporary art museum, he was struck by how unremarkable it was. ‘It was just a long concrete structure,’ he recalls. ‘There was nothing particularly unique about it.’

But his client, Purat ‘Chang’ Osathanugrah saw something else. Once part of Bangkok’s industrial backbone, the building sits near the city’s largest port, between the Rama IV and Sukhumvit 40 arterial roads. What makes Bangkok endlessly fascinating, Osathanugrah says, ‘is its layering of the old and the new - the hustle and bustle, the tuk-tuks and street vendors weaving between gleaming towers and quiet temples. We love that mix of grit and grace [of the old warehouse]: the raw structure paired with nostalgic Thai-Chinese window frames, all set against the backdrop of Bangkok’s largest port.’

The brief called for spaces that merge state-of-the-art climate control and lighting while remaining flexible enough to rotate the museum's collection of more than 1,000 works - essentially, an homage to the collecting legacy of Osathanugrah’s late father Petch. The museum’s name, Dib Bangkok, derives from the Thai word for ‘raw’ or ‘natural, authentic state’, though Yantrasast suggests it might even mean, in the context of the museum, ‘unfinished’ or ‘ongoing’.