Rearticulating Authority: Hybridity, Power, and the U-Thong Nai Assembly Hall in Thai Statecraft

Abstract

This paper investigates the ideological function of hybridity in modern Thai architecture through a postcolonial lens, focusing on the U-Thong Nai Assembly Hall, completed in 1974 and serving as Thailand’s National Assembly for forty-four years, as a case study. As one of the country’s most significant political buildings during the Cold War, the Assembly Hall embodied the military government’s effort to project a modern national identity while consolidating state authority. While Thailand was never formally colonized, its cultural and architectural development was deeply shaped by indirect Western imperial influences, a condition scholars have described as crypto-colonialism. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity and Néstor García Canclini’s concept of mestizaje, this study argues that Thai architectural modernity emerged not through passive imitation but through a calculated process of cultural appropriation, ambivalence, and elite political self-fashioning. Using parliamentary records, committee minutes, and government documents, as well as architectural analysis of the building’s spatial organization, form, and symbolic composition, the paper demonstrates how modernist forms were selectively combined with Thai architectural and iconographic elements to articulate both national identity and political legitimacy. Rather than merely reflecting foreign influence, the U-Thong Nai Assembly Hall functioned as an instrument of Thai statecraft, enabling the state to negotiate its dual position as both a formally sovereign nation and a participant within Western-led Cold War order. Ultimately, the paper contributes to broader debates in postcolonial architectural history by demonstrating how modern Thai architecture should be understood as a negotiated form of hybrid modernity rather than an exceptional case of uncolonized independence.