A short but beautiful trip in late 2019 was the last time I managed to set foot in Yangon, visiting the magical Tripitaka Library and being shown around inside. A few photos from the inside below, dug up from the SD card today. Looking at them feels strange, it is February 2021 after all and our friends in Yangon are going through some hard times.

There should be an article by yours truly coming out with German ARCH+ soon, which looks at modernist architecture in post-independence Myanmar and in which this beautiful building features. A lot of it I already explored for a blog post on Uncube a few years ago.

I was very fortunate to be admitted into most areas of the library thanks to a senior monk who used to work as an architect. The kind people of “Encounters with Southeast Asian Modernism” organized this.

You can read our book chapter here, alongside Manu’s much nicer pictures. I wish we could have gotten in back in 2015 when we did the research for our architectural guide!