Tuesday · August · 11 · 2026
“Travellers like poets are mostly an angry race.”
— Richard Francis Burton
Sun & daylight
The sun rises at 06:05 and sets at 18:43 in Bangkok today, giving 12h 38m of daylight. Solar noon is at 12:24.
06:05
Sunrise
12:24
Noon
18:43
Sunset
Midnight
00:24
Sunrise
06:05
Solar noon
12:24
Sunset
18:43
Solar midnight
00:24
Daylight
12h 38m
Daylight runs about 12h 56m around the June solstice and 11h 18m around the December solstice.
Daylight saving time
Bangkok does not observe daylight saving time. Clocks stay on UTC+7 all year, so the local time never shifts with the seasons.
Public holidays
Thailand has 1 public holiday in August 2026.
Architecture
Bangkok was laid out on canals and then paved most of them, so it now runs on elevated roads and rail with the temples left at ground level. Its architects have spent forty years arguing what a Thai building should look like at thirty storeys.
Completed 2017
Amanda Levete
A retail podium and hotel tower on the former gardens of the British embassy on Ploenchit Road. Levete twisted a single surface from the ground to the top, so podium and tower are one geometry rather than a slab on a box, and clad it in three hundred thousand extruded aluminium tiles. Each tile has two reflective faces, setting up a moiré that shifts as you move past. The pattern is drawn from Thai ornament and executed as digital fabrication.
Completed 2016
Ole Scheeren
A mixed-use tower in the central business district, seventy-seven storeys of hotel and apartments. Scheeren cut a ribbon of missing volumes spiralling up the full height, so the tower appears to be eroding, and turned each cut into a terrace or a projecting glass box for the flat behind it. The pixelated band is a plan device rather than a graphic. It gives an apartment tower in a hot climate the outdoor rooms that height normally removes.
Completed 1986
Sumet Jumsai
A bank headquarters in the Sathorn district, designed to look like a robot. Jumsai stepped the volume back in stages to satisfy a setback rule, then read those steps as shoulders, added two lightning rods as antennae and glazed two upper openings as eyes. The imagery came from one of his son's toys. It is usually named as the point where postmodernism arrived in Asia, and a 2023 renovation that flattened parts of it was publicly fought over.
Completed 1959
Jim Thompson
A house on a canal opposite the weavers' quarter, assembled from six traditional teak houses bought in Ayutthaya and elsewhere. Houses of this type are pegged rather than nailed, so the pieces could be taken apart, shipped and rebuilt; Thompson raised the cluster a full storey against flooding and turned some rooms to the canal. He ran the silk business across the water and disappeared in Malaysia in 1967. The house is a museum of his collection, in a building that is itself one.
Completed 1851
Rama III
A temple on the Thonburi bank of the Chao Phraya, built around a central prang in the Khmer tower form. Rama II raised the spire to its full height and Rama III finished it by 1851, encrusting the surface in broken Chinese porcelain that had arrived as ballast in trading ships. The prang is a model of Mount Meru, with smaller towers at the corners for the lesser peaks. Close up it is made of crockery; from the river it is a mountain.