The Sri Kabin Rama - Kabinburi, Prajinburi Province, Thailand

Most Thai cities, large or small, are connected to an extensive national highway system that seldom cuts through the city's older, pre-car urban core. The exception, of course, is vast Bangkok, the primate city, more than six-times the size of the second largest city. Numerous Bangkok neighborhoods have been eviscerated so that highways and expressways can wind their way through the jungle-dense metropolis.

But in the case of almost all other Thai towns, the highway was built around the urban core, with connector roads branching off onto narrow urban streets. This type of highway development is preferable to the alternative of ripping through the old town to bring traffic directly into the core. Old neighborhoods, saturated with history, have survived, if only in a stuffy coexistence with car traffic.

Despite being removed from the core, the highway system has managed to wreak havoc on Thai towns in other ways. While the town core may be structurally intact, they also tend to be economically flaccid. Thanks to the lifestyle shifts brought about by a rapid rise in car and motorcycle ownership, Thailand's "main street" economy, so to speak, has shifted to the peri-urban highway. There town dwellers and outside residents alike can easily drive (and perhaps more importantly, park) to take care of all their consumer needs. For all intents and purposes, the urban core becomes a bypassed zone, supplanted by national chain stores housed in boxy space-eating complexes. Aesthetic charms are at zero in these suburban behemoths. Sustainability is dubious.

Why the long introduction to the present state of Thai urban areas? Well, Kabinburi - home to the theater featured in this post - is perhaps the most obvious example a bypassed town in Thailand I've yet to encounter. It's present condition is a clear reflection of the Thai highway system's nefarious effect on dense urban cores.

Please bear in mind that this analysis is wholly observational. I will stop short of claims that the overall effect of the newer highway system is negative for locals. For all I know the economy might be better then ever on account of it. I'm simply saying that the economic pull of the highway has undermined the viability of Kabinburi's traditional urban core, where the streets are walkable, the architecture historic and aesthetic charms abound.  

Pulling into the Kabinburi bus station - appropriately located off the main highway outside of town - the first impression is of an interchangeable roadside pit. To reach the real Kabinburi requires a 5 minute-long song-taew ride away from highwayland.

Turning off the highway onto one of the several connector roads makes for an immediate change of scenery. The elevation drops a meter or so and the landscape goes from highway detritus to marshy and vegetated. To the trained eye, it is clear that the real Kabinburi has its roots in something riparian. Water was the fundamental nurturer of this settlement.

The song taew deposits passengers at the central market, just a stones throw from the train station, which in decades passed marked the most economically important part of town. Across the railroad tracks is the core of the town; the human scale agglomeration of shop houses, homes, banks, markets and, of course, a movie theater. The Sri Kabin Rama.

The now-abandoned Sri Kabin Rama nestled in its equally abandoned plaza - a victim of a car-centric economy, among other things.

Simple but attractive architecture, with it's neon-lit dimensional signage, so characteristic of the International Style. 

In small towns like Kabinburi, the local movie theater was often the most architecturally exciting building around. Eye candy for otherwise very ordinary, if not charming, little burgs. If it wasn't the architecture alone which caught ones attention, then it was the 2 and 3-story high hand painted billboards, festooned to the theaters facade, which lit up the street.

The Sri Kabin Rama, even in it lusterless post-life, is not surprisingly one of Kabinburi's architectural jewels. Set back from the street within an equally lifeless retail plaza, this asymmetrical dream palace pokes its head out from behind rundown shop-houses and lush vegetation.     

Its simple lines, asymmetry and signature sans serif dimensional lettering on the roof place this cinema relic firmly in the International Style school of architecture. The steel frame upholding the letters doubled as a structure to tie hand painted billboards advertising the film to. 

Left to decay

Fenced off lobby

Signage

As far as locals could recall - the owner included - it's been over 15 years since the Sri Kabin Rama last screened a movie. With its closure, so died the entire economy of the surrounding shop-houses, not one of which seems to have any activity today.

In a true sign of the times, the Sri Kabin Rama's owner is now focused on operating Tip Top Center, the anchor of an all-in-one strip mall sprawled out along the highway. He too followed the automotive trend towards the road to the detriment of the town. But for whatever reason, he has chosen not to demolished his old white elephant movie theater down in bypassed old town, Kabinburi. Good fortune for that. Its mothballed status will give future generations of Kabinburians a chance to decide a fitting reuse. Who knows, maybe some day the stand-alone movie theater will become hip again.