1. This research intends to explore the power of architectural surface in both aspects of its interior operation and exterior representation. It focuses on the role of architectural surface to shape and reshape the identities of both architecture and place. How architecture as it appears in direct experience - be it in its immediacy as a given texture or in its remoteness as an image - gives us references and clues to the work of architecture itself and of larger social, cultural, political and natural framework of its location. This two-way movement towards an inner and outer horizon endows architectural surface with the capacity to generate meaning - or ideology and locates it in the crucial juncture by which it seems capable of transcending its on superficiality in many possible directions.
2. Using the Rattanakosin Ancient City as a case study, this inquiry into the depth of architectural surface (facade-skin-covering-dressing-cladding) touches upon its visible and non-visible manifestations, i.e. upon its practical, material, constructional and representational aspects. Addressing various examples and innovative ways of thinking and building architectural surface in contemporary practice, the subjects include not only the relation between surface, material and production. The theme also suggests the relation between surface and meaning, image, form, space, human occupation as well as location in terms of the dialogue between architectural surface and its surroundings. Thus, this research addresses surface as a basic premises of architecture. The manifold of architectural surface appears not only within the parameter of architectural body but also outside of it. Surfaces of architecture and their surroundings are not two separate things, for they represent the different levels of boundaries in which we dwell.
3. Endowed with historical, social and cultural significance, the architecture of the Rattanakosin Ancient City has inevitably been situated in the dichotomy of modernity and tradition, global technology and regional characteristic, as well as the conflict between its interior operation and exterior representation. This research, while focusing on various aspects architectural facade, will use the Rattanakosin Ancient City as a site for a theoretical discussion on various roles and implications of architectural surface as well as its power to shape and reshape the identities of both architecture and place.
