Khaisri Tansiri’s Approaches in Museum Design and the Monk Utensil Museums of Forest-Dwelling Monastics

Abstract

From the 1950s onwards, forest monks in Northeastern Thailand have gained significant attention from local peoples and those from the country's Central region, ranging from monarchs, royal families, and courtiers to business people. Following the deaths of famous forest monks, their disciples, both monkhood and secular, often build a museum or monk's household utensil museum to store their relics, display their eight necessities, and exhibit their biographies. Thus, museums and monk's household utensil museums emerge as a new building type in a monastery, designed in accordance with other traditional edifices such as Ubosot and Vihara.

         Previously, royal craftsmen or local artisans were groups of men responsible for the creation of religious buildings. However, following architectural education's establishment at Chulalongkorn University in the 1933, architects have emerged as an alternative profession in the design of religious architecture. This paper investigates the architectural works of Khaisri Tansiri, the architect at Ministry of Public Health, in the design of museums and monk's household utensils museums designed between 1967 and 1997. The finding is that her early work differs significantly from Thai traditional architecture due to her education and the circumstances in which she worked when modern architecture was the most favoured style in architectural circles. Another significant contribution to Khaisri's work came from King Rama IX, who played a significant part in the later developments of the architect’s contemporary Buddhist architecture.

         Khaisri's architectural works can be divided into 3 phases. The first phase was a reinterpretation of Thai traditional architecture with modern architectural style, best represented by Phra Ajahn Man Museum, whose building forms and decoration resemble a Buddhist temple. The second phase started when she used pagoda's form for museum design, following the advice of King's Rama IX, who gave an idea that a religious museum should be built in the form of a pagoda. King Rama IX's influence continued into Khaisri's third phase. During that time, the architect designed a monk's household utensil using a sketch of a pagoda drawn by the king as the crowning image of the building. It was this particular premise that shaped her late design development.