From Techno-cute to Superflat: Robots and Asian Architectural Futures

It may surprise some of you when I say that I first began to acquire a knowledge of Buddhism through a study of robots, in which I am still engaged today. It may surprise you even more when I add that I believe that robots have Buddha-nature within them— that is, the potential for attaining Buddhahood.

—Mori Masahiro, The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion

The Robot

The Thai architect Sumet Jumsai’s former Bank of Asia building (now United Overseas Bank) is one of the most distinctive sights on the Bangkok skyline. Approaching its twenty-story bulk along Sathorn Road, the building looms as a stack of giant cubic forms (Figure 1, left). However on closer inspection, it becomes clear that this stack of cubes is actually a giant robot. The building’s tripartite vertical division can be distinguished as “legs,” “body,” and “head,” each articulated by strips of curtain walling (Figure 1, right). On each side of the “legs,” ground floor openings are surrounded by canopies that mimic robot tank-track feet (Figure 2, left). Oversized “bolts” emerge from higher up (Figure 2, right), while at the front of the head facing the street, there are reflective glass “eyeballs” partially covered by louvered “eyelids” and twin antennae. While all this is quite startling in a bank building, in a sense, the use of mechanistic imagery is not so strange. The bank was completed in 1986, the same year as Richard Rogers’s Lloyds Bank and Norman Foster’s Hong Kong Shanghai Bank buildings. However, while the Bank of Asia’s technologically based imagery might be broadly comparable to these other banks, it lacks their coldly mechanistic representation of ducts, struts, and pipes. Instead, Jumsai’s robot is unashamedly anthropomorphic in its expression of technology. Its robot “eyelids” were even intended to “wink” at night, accompanied by lighting that pulsated to the rhythm of “The Robot Symphony,” a piece by a local composer.¹

Figure 1.

Former Bank of Asia building (now United Overseas Bank), Bangkok. Left: View along Sathorn Road. Right: View of front. Photographs by the author.

By anthropomorphizing the robot, the Bank of Asia blends humanity and technology in a manner similar to the Japanese toy robots from which its imagery is derived, and so renders explicit notions about technology that are quite different from its British high-tech contemporaries. It looks forward to a future in which the information age will be friendly and anthropomorphic. There is no sense of humanity’s alienation from high technology. Moreover,

Figure 2.

Former Bank of Asia building (now United Overseas Bank), Bangkok. Left: “Caterpillar tracks” on side of building. Right: “Bolts” on side of building. Photographs by the author.

the robot’s expression is strangely endearing, even cute, a curious attribute for the twenty-story headquarters of a major financial institution. The robot identity of the building is only skin-deep, especially now that the original foyer, adorned with rather anthropotechnical sculptures of Thaveechai Nitiprabha, has been replaced by something more conventionally bland. The robot identity is now confined to the skin of the building. Underneath its techno-cute packaging, the business that is the Bank of Asia is presumably no more endearing than any other financial institution. Yet the layering of such apparently contradictory expressions and attributes in Jumsai’s design make it a fascinating subject, particularly if we place it in the context of more recent developments. Jumsai’s Japanese-derived robot is now over twenty years old, and, since its completion, three characteristics of the building—its machine/ animist identity, its portrayal of this identity as endearing, and its reference to a specifically Japanese popular culture—have all become more globalized phenomena. Because of this, it is worth examining the interconnections between these three characteristics. In the postwar period, Japan was a land known in the West first for its clever imitation and then its enhancement of Western products—as Iwabuchi Kōichi describes...