A permanent Scottish shower from which, strangely enough, only the best is retained, in a city where the surprising ballet of tradition and modernity continues to act like a magnet.
Modernity, to be precise, is the business of Silom and Sathorn, the two great parallels that link the Chao Praya River to Lumphini Park and where most of the head offices of the country's major economic players, both national and foreign, are concentrated. Silom and Sathorn are the two most obvious symbols of the metamorphosis of a city that has grown in half a century from two to eight million inhabitants. A transformation that is clearly reflected in the landscape.
At the end of the 1970s, only twenty or so buildings in Bangkok were more than six storeys high. At the start of the new millennium, there are more than 1,000, and 36 of them are over 150 metres high. Silom and Sathorn are the stigmata - more or less complete - of this new gigantism, where all styles, indigenous and exogenous, present or past, harmonious or disorderly, meet. It's a tangle that's hard to navigate without a few reference points.
