If you see only one thing in Talat Noi this week, make it this. Tucked inside The Warehouse Bangkok is one of the most unusual exhibitions of the year. Spread across nearly 50 square metres of floor space are two sprawling cardboard cities: Bangkok in the 1880s and Ayutthaya around 1700, recreated in meticulous detail by 23-year-old artist Alexander Coke Smith VI, known as Coke.
The work is on show for just a few more days, with open hours until November 27. Entry is free, and Coke is usually in the space to talk visitors through the models, answer questions and point out hidden details. For anyone who loves Bangkok history or simply enjoys the thrill of seeing the city from above, it is a must-see.
What you will find inside
Enter Warehouse’s ground floor and the first thing that hits you is the scale. Coke’s model of 1880s Bangkok unfolds like a living map: canals, temples and wooden neighbourhoods arranged on a 1:1,000 scale, where one metre represents one kilometre. The Grand Palace anchors the scene, surrounded by moats, monasteries and the irregular grid of the old riverside settlements.
Beside it is a second work, an equally detailed recreation of Ayutthaya at its peak, around 1700. At that time the city had close to a million inhabitants and was considered one of the world’s great capitals. Coke’s model shows its monumental layout, where temples line up in long geometric axes, something that is easy to miss when you wander the present-day ruins.
To help visitors read the landscape, Coke includes modern Bangkok skyscrapers at the same scale, placed at the model’s edge. They act as visual anchors, revealing just how compact old Bangkok was before twentieth century growth swallowed its skyline.
Built from rum boxes and patience
All of this is made from recycled paper and cardboard, mostly Sangsom rum boxes collected from bars near Coke’s home on Koh Lanta. The shimmering gold printed on those boxes transforms into the gilding on temple roofs. The structures are surprisingly solid, held together with hot glue, super glue, paint, toothpicks used as tiny beams and finished with a generous spray of lacquer.
Coke works alone, in a studio under his home. He has been obsessed with miniature worlds since childhood, when he built imaginary cities out of beach rocks. That instinct followed him into his teens, when he spent years wandering Bangkok’s temples, photographing and studying their architecture. The two fascinations eventually merged.
‘When people ask me why I build these cities, the answer is simple,’ he told us. ‘Because I want to see them. When I walk through Ayutthaya, I imagine what it looked like in 1700. When I walk through Bangkok, I picture 1880. The models help me understand where I am.’
A research project disguised as art
The result is both an artwork and a form of historical investigation. Coke builds using old maps, early photographs and Google Earth overlays, sketching nothing digitally. The physical model becomes the process. Once he fixes a building in place, he has effectively reached a point of research clarity on that detail. In total, these two cities took him five years to create in tandem.
He points to two things that surprised him: the near mathematical precision of Ayutthaya’s temple alignments and the number of vanished structures in old Bangkok, especially nineteenth century clock towers that have disappeared.
‘Ayutthaya’s temples line up over long distances in a way most people don’t realise,’ he says. ‘And Bangkok used to have many beautiful clock towers. Almost none of them exist today.’
Why Talat Noi
The Warehouse is an ideal setting. This riverside neighbourhood features in Coke’s Bangkok model, and the real-life streets outside echo the miniature lanes on the table. He first came across the venue through a DJ friend in Chiang Mai and fell for its relaxed, creative energy.
He is present most days of the exhibition to talk visitors through the models. Conversations flow in Thai and English, and range from temple history to city planning to cardboard engineering. Visitors often come for the atmosphere and stay long enough to fall down historical rabbit holes.
See it before it disappears
Give yourself time. The longer you look, the more the city reveals itself: tiny wooden bridges, the Giant Swing tucked among rooftops, old moats and vanished roads, temple grids aligned with impossible precision, entire neighbourhoods erased by fire or redevelopment.
The show runs for only a short window before the models return with Coke to his island studio. Visitors often arrive out of curiosity and end up staying longer than planned. As Coke puts it, ‘People who never thought they cared about history suddenly get hooked. They lean in, spot something small, and then they want to know everything.’
The Warehouse Bangkok. Free entry. Talat Noi, Charoen Krung Road. 10am-10pm (check daily schedule).
