Skyline and Famous Towers in Bangkok
A visual guide from the Bangkok travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
The pixelated tower that looks as though a chunk has been bitten out of its side is King Power Mahanakhon, 314 metres above Chong Nonsi, and the top of it is a glass tray you walk out onto with eight lanes of traffic crawling directly beneath your shoes. Bangkok's skyline has no single centre. It clusters in three: the Silom–Sathorn financial spine, the Sukhumvit corridor running east, and a newer wall of glass along the Chao Phraya near ICONSIAM. From height, the river is the only thing that organises the sprawl.
The high viewpoints
Mahanakhon's SkyWalk pairs an indoor deck around the 78th floor with the rooftop glass floor, and connects straight to BTS Chong Nonsi. Baiyoke Sky Tower in Pratunam is older, cheaper and 304 metres tall, with a fixed deck and a slowly revolving platform above it, and it looks back over the low-rise old city in a way the newer towers cannot. If you would rather buy a drink than a ticket, Vertigo and Moon Bar sit on the Banyan Tree's 61st floor, Sky Bar's lit dome tops lebua on Silom, and Octave's stacked circular tiers at the Marriott on Sukhumvit 57 turn a full circle over the eastern corridor. Dress codes generally apply after dark.
At ground level
You do not need altitude to read this skyline. Walking east along Sathorn from BTS Chong Nonsi, Mahanakhon's notched flank lines up against Empire Tower and the unfinished concrete shell of Sathorn Unique, the city's best-known abandoned high-rise. Lumphini Park's lake mirrors the Rama IV wall of glass, One Bangkok's new towers included, and the gates open around dawn. On Sukhumvit, the terrace gardens above the EM District malls at Phrom Phong look straight down the avenue. The cheapest moving viewpoint in the city is still the orange-flag express boat, which trades the towers for the low riverfront and costs next to nothing.