Nana Plaza

Brief information

Nana Plaza is arranged as a square three-story building with a single entrance on the western side, and this enclosed form is more important than the sign. The place is known as a sex complex in Bangkok and is positioned as the world’s largest adult entertainment venue. The name is connected with the Nana family, which owns real estate in this area.

The strongest contrast here lies in the building’s former purpose. In the late 1970s, the complex began operating as a shopping center with restaurants, and in the 1980s the first go-go bars gradually displaced the shops and restaurants. Nana Plaza is therefore read not as an entertainment zone deliberately designed from scratch, but as a retail shell whose function changed: the floors, entrance, and internal organization remained more important than a long chronology of owners.

What to notice first

It makes sense to compare three physical things: the square layout, the single western entrance, and the distribution of venues across the floors. The square makes the complex resemble an enclosed internal block, while the single entrance emphasizes that movement into it is gathered at one point rather than scattered across several facades.

The second layer of observation is the building’s vertical arrangement. The second and third floors list short-time hotels connected with the bars through the practice of bar fines. As of November 2017, kathoey bars were located on different levels: one on the first floor, several on the second, and one on the third. In this way the building can be read not only by its facade but also by its floors: a former shopping center became a complex where functions are distributed by level and connected with one another.