Ong-ard Satrabhandhu

Biography

The Panaphandhu School in Bangkok, built on Le Corbusier’s five points, has long since been demolished. Its architect, Ong-ard Satrabhandhu, had himself been a pupil there and later designed a building for it.

He was born on 8 February 1944 in Bangkok, the youngest of four children. He received his secondary education at the Panaphandhu School and then went to the United States. At Cornell University he took his Bachelor of Architecture in 1965, and his teacher there was Colin Rowe. Among his student awards were Cornell’s York Prize (1960) and Baird Prize (1962). In 1967 he finished a master’s degree at Yale University. He worked for a time at the firm Glen Paulsen & Associates in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and in 1969 founded his own office in Bangkok, on Si Ayutthaya Road. His early buildings were almost entirely of concrete, in the spirit of Le Corbusier’s modernism. They include the Panaphandhu School building, where the ideas of the five points are applied very directly, and the physics teaching block at Kasetsart University, built in the manner of Brutalism. He also designed the Chang Building (the “Elephant Building”) in Bangkok, a tower once included in lists of the world’s most unusual skyscrapers.

In his later work he moved to local motifs. The Rachamankha hotel in Chiang Mai is regarded as one of his best-known works. At Tamarind Village in the same city he used the forms of Lanna, the northern Thai tradition, throughout; in 2002 the project won the “Promoting Beautiful Chiang Mai” award. It seems to me that these two buildings above all show how he joins Eastern and Western architectural languages, as is so often said of him.

Among his other recognised works is the house of Dr Kon and Lady Nirmon Suriyasat, which received the Association of Siamese Architects’ award for outstanding architecture. In 1982 a project for the Henkel Thai factory received the same recognition. In 1994, on the Association’s sixtieth anniversary, he was given the title “outstanding architect”. He also served on the jury for the Association’s awards for the best buildings.

In 2009 he became a National Artist of Thailand in the visual arts, in the category of contemporary architecture. In 2010 he was awarded the Order of Direkgunabhorn, fourth class. In 2015 a book on his work appeared, “A Tradition of Serenity: The Tropical Houses of Ong-ard Satrabhandhu”.

In 2020 he was awarded the Driehaus Architecture Prize. He is currently working on the planning and design of the external envelope of the “One Nimman” urban development in Chiang Mai.