Vann Molyvann: Cambodia's forgotten architect

Cambodian architecture Vann Molyvann, 78, sketches a project in Phnom Penh, in 2005. Vann Molyvann was a key creative force behind many landmarks, ranging from the National Sports Complex to the Independence Monument and experimental low-cost apartments. (Tang Chhin Sothy / AFP / Getty Images)

Chaktomuk Hall on the banks of the Tonle Sap River in Phnom Penh, completed in 1961. The 570-seat auditorium's structure, inspired by an unfolded hand-held fan, is still in use as a performance space. (Courtesy of Vann Molyvann)

In the 1960s, he redefined the look of his homeland architecturally. Now his works are being lost to redevelopment. Admirers are working to highlight his importance.

November 14, 2010

By Dustin Roasa

Special to the Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Sihanoukville, Cambodia — — Architect Bill Greaves stood on a bluff outside the city and admired an elegant white and peach building perched high above the beaches and guesthouses that have made this seaside spot into a tourist boomtown. Inspired by the dong raik, a pole used by rural Cambodians to carry loads on their shoulders, the building seemed to float in the air, its concrete and brick second floor held aloft by a complex web of hidden beams.

"It's a gem, but it's not very well known," Greaves said of the SKD Brewery offices, built in 1968 by Cambodia's most gifted and visionary architect, Vann Molyvann.

In the 1960s, under the iron-fisted patronage of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Vann Molyvann helped transform Cambodia from a sleepy former French colony into one of the most architecturally arresting countries in Asia. But after surviving decades of civil war and the terror of Khmer Rouge rule, the architect's buildings are being demolished as Cambodia seeks to rebuild.

Although Vann Molyvann, 83, is back in Phnom Penh after years of living overseas, there is little he can do to prevent his work from disappearing. In 2008, two of his greatest works, the National Theater and the Council of Ministers building, were demolished. In 2001, the government sold his Olympic Stadium to a Taiwanese developer, who altered the complex's drainage system to the point that it floods frequently.

In response, admirers such as Greaves, art historian Darryl Collins, who cowrote the only book in English about 1950s and 1960s Cambodian architecture, and architect Geoff Pyle, who founded an organization that offers guided tours of Phnom Penh's notable buildings, are working to highlight Vann Molyvann's importance. He remains virtually unknown in Cambodia, where he is not taught in the country's high schools and universities, and his international profile is low.

Greaves had traveled from his base in Phnom Penh to the brewery in Sihanoukville with a team of volunteers working with the Vann Molyvann Project, an organization he established in 2009 to document the architect's buildings. Nearly all of Vann Molyvann's blueprints were lost during Cambodia's years of turmoil, so Greaves and his volunteers are re-creating them from scratch to leave a record for future generations.

As the sun burned off the morning mist and lipstick-red trucks roared by full of Angkor beer — the SKD complex remains a functioning brewery — Cambodian and American volunteers in their 20s moved methodically through the space, hand measuring doorways, columns and anything else they could get their tape measurers on. They would spend the better part of three days sizing up the building before heading back to Phnom Penh, where they were creating scale models and drawings for the first major exhibition of Vann Molyvann's work, which opened in Phnom Penh in late September.

Greaves first encountered Vann Molyvann's buildings when he was visiting as a tourist in 2004. "I was astonished. I didn't know anything about architecture in Cambodia in the 1960s," he said. He was struck by the architect's daring use of concrete to create massive, expressive forms, "the kinds of things you could never convince a structural engineer to do nowadays," he said.

The buildings ingeniously used what might now be called green technology, including ventilation, natural lighting and drainage systems, to mitigate Cambodia's harsh climate, which alternates between periods of torrential rain and extreme heat. The buildings also referenced objects from Cambodian culture, such as mystical Buddhist serpents called nagas and the straw hats worn by peasants working in the fields.

After returning to Cambodia several times, Greaves quit his job at Steven Harris Architects in New York and moved to Phnom Penh to found the Vann Molyvann Project, which has consulted extensively with the Cambodian architect in its work. "I am extremely grateful for what they are doing," Vann Molyvann said of his foreign admirers.

Vann Molyvann's life has been shaped by the twists and turns of his country's tumultuous history. Born in 1926, he attended Cambodia's only high school during World War II. However, his studies were interrupted by Japan's takeover of the country during the war, but he managed to graduate and in 1945 won one of two scholarships that year for Cambodians to study in France.

At the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he received architectural training from disciples of Le Corbusier, who taught him the influential French architect's "Le Modulor," a system of proportion that Vann Molyvann later used as the basis for his designs. He thought little about his home country and "drowned in French culture completely," he said. Meanwhile, his compatriots in Paris at the time, including a young Pol Pot, soaked up the Marxism and Stalinism that would form the ideological basis of the Khmer Rouge.

Vann Molyvann returned to Phnom Penh in 1956, and he was one of a few architects in Cambodia with formal training. Cambodia had gained independence from France in 1953, but it remained a poor, rural country with no recent history of cities or urban planning. "Architecture was a strange concept in Cambodia. They did not know what it was," he said. He opened a firm but found little private work.

His fortunes changed when Norodom Sihanouk appointed him chief architect for state buildings and director for urban planning and habitat. With access to government commissions, he could begin designing civic buildings that combined the Modernist and Brutalist sensibilities he had learned in Paris with Cambodia's traditions and way of life.

Over the next decade and a half, Vann Molyvann built dozens of buildings in Phnom Penh and elsewhere in Cambodia. His crowning achievement was the Olympic Stadium, a sprawling sports complex that was built in advance of the Southeast Asian Games of 1963, which were never held. With a water-management system inspired by the moats and channels of ancient Angkor and soaring concrete overhangs, the design helped usher in a period of architectural and cultural creativity. He was in his early 30s at the time. "Imagine having the possibility to build such a thing when you are that age," Vann Molyvann said, his eyes twinkling.

Norodom Sihanouk viewed architecture as a way of expressing the aspirations for progress and modernity of the newly independent Cambodian people. He poured significant portions of the national budget into construction projects, and he deftly exploited Cambodia's Cold War neutrality to land aid from both the Americans and the Soviets.

"Sihanouk was extremely open to the outside world," Vann Molyvann said. "Cambodians had enormous enthusiasm to build the country, and fortunately for us, Prince Sihanouk shared this feeling."

Norodom Sihanouk's showpiece was the Russian Boulevard, which connected central Phnom Penh to its international airport. Lined with many of Vann Molyvann's most significant buildings, including the Teachers' Training College and the Council of Ministers building, the road was designed to impress visiting dignitaries.

But Norodom Sihanouk could not keep his country neutral forever. With the Vietnam War spilling over into Cambodia, Vann Molyvann left with his family in 1972, and the prince's cosmopolitanism eventually gave way to the savage xenophobia of the Khmer Rouge. Vann Molyvann spent the next two decades as a consultant with the United Nations at various posts around the world.

He moved back to Cambodia in 1993, but his second return has proved more difficult than the first. Although he was appointed head of the organization that managed the site of the Angkor temples, the current government of Prime Minister Hun Sen removed him from that post after he publicly complained about government corruption. "I felt that entrance fees for Angkor should go to the people, not to civil servants in Phnom Penh. They said, 'Get out, Molyvann,'" he said.

Out of favor with the government, Vann Molyvann has watched the urban landscape in Phnom Penh transform. Norodom Sihanouk's Russian Boulevard, that bellwether of Cambodia's aspirations, now swarms with trucks and motorbikes carrying goods and migrants into the city, and it is lined with the glass-and-steel office buildings and cookie-cutter housing developments of Cambodia's recent economic boom. The new Chinese-designed and funded Council of Ministers building, which replaced Vann Molyvann's, features a pyramid framed by what resembles an enormous drawbridge. It would not look out of place in a Chinese provincial capital.

"There's a very strong notion in Cambodia that a modern city should be like Shanghai or Bangkok, where the emphasis is on verticality," said Greaves of the Vann Molyvann Project. "Late Modern architecture is a little harder for the general public to love."

While the efforts of Greaves and others have raised Vann Molyvann's profile among Cambodians, the fate of his buildings ultimately rests with the current government, which came to power in 1979 after defeating the Khmer Rouge. "The government doesn't want to leave anything from before 1979, because it wasn't their achievement. History is completely manipulated," Vann Molyvann said.

Today, he has an official government title, but it is essentially an honorific. He is working on translating his PhD dissertation, about urbanization in Southeast Asia, into Khmer, the Cambodian language.

Beng Khemro, deputy director general of the country's Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction, said the government is doing everything it can to preserve Cambodia's architectural heritage. "But economic development and modernization inevitably bring about changes in every country, and Cambodia is no exception," he said.

Young Cambodians like Yin Sotheara, a 21-year-old architecture student and volunteer with the Vann Molyvann Project, hope to play a role in that development. Back at the SKD Brewery offices, he took a break from measuring a rear-facing balcony to discuss his future after graduation.

"There are not many opportunities for Cambodian architects. Most of the new buildings are being built by Chinese and Koreans," he said. But learning about Vann Molyvann had for the first time provided him with a Cambodian architectural role model. "Vann Molyvann showed that you can take foreign concepts and mix them with Cambodian traditions to make new buildings," he said. "I want to make buildings that are suited to the Cambodian way of life."

Building residents concerned about eviction

Report and Video by Mom Sophon, Radio Free Asia

"Today, it's not the state who owns the old properties, but the ruling party, the CPP": Vann Molyvann

Independence Monument; Vann Molyvann, architect (All photos: Luke Duggleby for The Wall Street Journal)
A lone figure walks the stands of Vann Molyvann's Olympic Stadium.
The Chaktomuk Conference Hall, one of Mr. Molyvann's earliest designs, was built in 1961.
The library at the Institute for Foreign Languages, now part of the Royal University of Phnom Penh
More of Mr. Molyvann's work at the Institute for Foreign Languages
Yet more of the institute

Modern Masterpieces

MAY 28, 2010
By TOM VATER
The Wall Street Journal

Vann Molyvann, Cambodia's greatest living architect, recalls that the night his Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh was completed, in 1964, "I took my wife to see the work." Sitting in the top tier of the stands, they listened to Dvorák's "New World Symphony" over the stadium's speaker system. "It was one of the great moments of my life."

In the years after Cambodia won independence from France in 1953, Mr. Molyvann—then scarcely in his 30s—set out under the tutelage of King Norodom Sihanouk to transform Phnom Penh from a colonial backwater into a modern city. But in the late 1960s the country was drawn into decades of war and terror, including years under the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, and Mr. Molyvann's vision was virtually forgotten. The architect himself had to flee the country.

And while he returned in triumph after more than 20 years abroad, it was to find that grand titles didn't translate into influence in today's Cambodia. His legacy—structures in a style dubbed New Khmer Architecture—lives on, contributing significantly to the flair of the city, but even that is in danger as Phnom Penh, like other Asian capitals, clears historic buildings to make room for skyscrapers.

Cambodia is best known for its magnificent temple ruins at Angkor, remnants of a great Southeast Asian empire that covered the country's current territory as well as parts of Vietnam, Thailand and Laos. After Angkor fell to the Siamese in the 15th century, a new Cambodian capital was founded on the banks of the Tonlé Sap River. That city, Phnom Penh, remained an unstable settlement, caught up in the geopolitical ambitions of Cambodia's more powerful neighbors, until the French arrived in the 1860s. The colonial administrators drained the neighboring swamps and created a grid street plan, dotted with sumptuous villas, Art Deco markets and impressive government structures.

Even then, Phnom Penh was modest, small-town colonial France—and when Mr. Molyvann received a scholarship from the colonial government and set off for the Sorbonne in Paris, it wasn't with the dream of returning to remake it. He was a law student. But as he pursued his degree, and struggled with the compulsory Greek and Latin, he had an encounter that changed his life.

"I met Henri Marchal, the curator of Angkor for the École Française d'Extrême-Orient [the French School of Asian Studies]," Mr. Molvyann remembers, "and suddenly I knew I wanted to be an architect, so I changed to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, where I studied until 1950 under Le Corbusier." He regards that modernist architect and designer as his greatest teacher.

After that, Mr. Molyvann stayed on in Paris for several more years, studying Khmer art. While he looks back fondly on the period, he is also keenly aware that some of Cambodia's later traumas had their origins in the Paris of that time.

"The Khmer Rouge was born in the Latin quarter of Paris," he says. As they debated their country's postcolonial future, Mr. Molyvann says, the city's 400 or so Cambodian students split between nationalists and Marxists. Khieu Samphan, whom he knew as a fellow Sorbonne student, would go on to become head of state in the Khmer Rouge government.

By 1956, Mr. Molyvann was back in Phnom Penh. Independence had broadened Cambodia's horizons, in part thanks to the efforts of King Sihanouk, who at various times officially dropped his title to serve as prime minister, head of state or president, though Cambodians continued to refer to him as king. With tremendous energy and not a little royal eccentricity, the young monarch—also politician, artist, filmmaker, womanizer and host to a series of foreign heads of state and celebrities—worked to create a modern nation with an eye on the past. The leading members of an emerging urban elite, many of whom, like Mr. Molyvann, had returned from Paris, sought to create architecture, music, films, literature and art that married Cambodian tradition with modernist thinking.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in new administrative, public and private building projects that sprang up all over the capital—transforming Phnom Penh, within little more than a decade, into one of Asia's most dynamic cities.

"It was difficult at the beginning, as Cambodians had never heard of architects," Mr. Molyvann remembers. "All they knew were engineers and builders. There was a real dearth of qualified Khmer experts, as the French had used Vietnamese to administer my country. But within 10 years of independence the management of the country and its capital was Khmer. It was incredible."

Mr. Molyvann was made chief architect for state buildings and director for urban planning and habitat in 1956 and given a number of ministerial posts in the following years. "I was designing the Independence Monument and was asked to present the king with a selection of marble," he recalls. "I was too afraid to speak to him personally, but he made some suggestions and we got on perfectly after that." Shaped like a lotus flower, the monument tower, completed in 1960, remains one of Phnom Penh's landmarks.

Mr. Molyvann had part of the floodplain south of the Royal Palace drained and filled, and on this "Front de Bassac" constructed the country's first high-rises, initially for visiting athletes for the 1966 Ganefo Games, a short-lived Asian alternative to the Olympics.

"We built the stadium for 60,000 people and surrounded it with a moat, so that the waters could run off in the rainy season," he says.

Stefanie Irmer, whose KA Tours focuses on New Khmer Architecture, sees the relation between water and city as crucial to the architect's vision for Phnom Penh. "Besides creating the 'Front de Bassac' area from wetlands," she says, "almost every building Vann Molyvann designed was surrounded by water—to keep the termites out, but also to integrate the buildings into the flood plain."

Many of Mr. Molyvann's buildings are traditional in one sense—they are shaped like familiar objects. Chaktomuk Conference Hall, one of his earliest designs, is like an open palm leaf. The library of the Institute of Foreign Languages (now part of the Royal University of Phnom Penh) was inspired by a traditional Khmer straw hat. The lecture halls of the institute rest on sharply angled concrete pillars that give them the appearance of animals, about to jump. They are still in use today, as is the library.

By the early 1960s, for the first time in almost 800 years, Cambodia was blooming. The Angkor ruins were the region's biggest tourist draw, and Phnom Penh had doubled in size and become a city others in the region admired.

But the politics were turning ugly. Norodom Sihanouk, serving as prime minister, began to suppress dissent. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. had combat troops in Vietnam; as American planes began bombing North Vietnamese positions in Cambodia, the country's policy of neutrality became a farce. The former king's repressive policies alienated the political left and some rural Cambodians, who began to join a shadowy communist movement, the Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile, the right and military had become fed up with his capriciousness and nepotism. When he left to visit China in 1970, a coup replaced him with army general Lon Nol. The Swinging '60s, the meteoric rise of a young nation, the building boom in the "Pearl of Asia"—it was all over.

Mr. Molyvann remembers days with hard choices. "Shortly after Lon Nol came to power, the Israeli ambassador advised me to take my family out of the country," he says; the ambassador, a friend of his, warned him about the crumbling security and the increasing persecution of those connected with the previous government. So when Mr. Molyvann left for a conference in Israel, with his wife, Trudy, and their six children, they didn't return. Instead they moved on to Switzerland, his wife's home country.

Five years later, the Khmer Rouge marched victoriously into Phnom Penh. The new rulers immediately emptied the cities, and for almost four years Phnom Penh was a ghost town. At least 1.5 million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the population—Mr. Molyvann's father among them—lost their lives in the killing fields. The fledgling intellectual elite was snuffed out.

"I had no contact during those years," says Mr. Molyvann. "I had to give my children a new life, so we stayed in Lausanne." He continued to work as an architect in Switzerland, Africa and Laos, for the United Nations and the World Bank. The Vietnamese pushed out the Khmer Rouge in 1979, but Mr. Molyvann "could not think of going back." The new rulers "were still communists."

"It was not until 1993 that I returned—with the U.N.," he says. Initially, his homecoming was triumphant. He was appointed minister of state for culture and fine arts, territorial management and urban planning and contributed to the application for Angkor's successful recognition as a Unesco World Heritage site.

But he soon realized that the Cambodia he had left behind in 1970 no longer existed. Cambodian People's Party leader Hun Sen, who had been installed by the Vietnamese and who continued as prime minister after the U.N.-organized elections, gave Mr. Molyvann back his villa, but the architect's plans for Siem Reap—the province in which Angkor is located—were unappreciated. He had called for a "tourist village" set apart from both the temples and the old town of Siem Reap, integrated into the environment and with water conservation as a key goal.

"The government wanted to use the resources of Angkor to develop Siem Reap without the participation of the local people," Mr. Molyvann says. "In 1998, I became president executive director of Apsara (Authority for the Protection and Safeguard of Angkor), the government body created to look after the temples. Three years later, I was fired." Unchecked development in Siem Reap has led to a dramatic drop in groundwater levels, causing subsidence that has put the Bayon, one of the main temples in the Angkor area, in danger of collapse, according to experts from the Japanese Conservation Team for Safeguarding Angkor. Development has also driven up property prices and the cost of living, a hardship for the locals in a province that remains one of the poorest in the country.

But it was not just the government and developers standing against Mr. Molyvann and his vision. Bill Greaves, director of the Vann Molyvann Project, a nongovernmental organization engaged in recreating the lost plans of the remaining New Khmer Architecture sites, thinks postwar Cambodia is simply not aware of its past.

"Right now, Singapore and Shanghai are models for forward-looking cities, both for the government and the people," he says. "Hence Phnom Penh's different stages of history are likely to be discarded."

In the past decade, as investment has begun to pour into the Cambodian capital once more, colonial and 1960s buildings have been replaced by chrome-and-glass edifices, floodwater lakes have been drained, local media have reported almost daily evictions and ministers have gushed over the need to build skyscrapers in order to keep up with the neighbors.

The government frequently declares that preservation has to go hand in hand with development. In practice, it seems to walk well behind. Beng Khemro, deputy director general at the ministry for land management, urban planning and construction, says his department's hands are tied. "Many historical properties are in terrible condition," he says. "The people who own them don't understand the value of the past and would rather demolish them and build high-rises to make a profit. The past is not appreciated. Without a change in attitude amongst the population, we are fighting a losing battle."

Cambodia has preservation laws, and Dr. Khemro says he is trying to pass a regulation to get them applied in particular instances. He'd like to try a pilot preservation project away from Phnom Penh, he says, noting that Cambodia's second-largest city, Battambang, has many buildings from the French period.

"Also," he adds, "there's less pressure."

Molyvann advocate Mr. Greaves is skeptical about the survival of the architect's legacy. "The old buildings disappear at an alarming rate—even public edifices like the National Theatre, which was knocked down a couple of years ago, are not safe. We try and get there before the demolition crews arrive."

A drive around town with Mr. Molyvann illustrates his curious position in this free-for-all scramble for change. At the Independence Monument, guards at first refuse him entry. Only after his driver reveals the distinguished visitor's identity is the master architect, old and frail, allowed to climb the steps he designed half a century ago.

Passing the stadium, Mr. Molyvann looks at the haphazard development around his favorite creation. Appropriated by developers with government connections, the moat has been partly filled in to make space for shops and an underground car park; the result is annual flooding that threatens the entire sports complex.

With equal shades of sadness and anger in his voice, Mr. Molyvann says, "Today, it's not the state who owns the old properties, but the ruling party, the CPP."

—Tom Vater is a writer based in Bangkok.

Vann Molyvann calls on Cambodian engineers abroad to return home to help improve engrg. education and development: Are you ready to return?

Architect Vann Molyvann (Photo: Cambodge Soir Hebdo)

Shoring up the foundations

Monday, 10 August 2009
Khouth Sophak Chakrya
The Phnom Penh Post

Veteran architect Vann Molyvann says Cambodian engineers working abroad should return home to help improve engineering education and development.

Though Cambodia has 180 engineers who have been certified by the ASEAN Federation of Engineering Organisations (AFEO), Vann Molyvann, the Kingdom's most famous architect, says there is much to be done to bring Cambodian engineering up to international standards.

"The shortage of facilities, materials, and especially well-experienced professors are the main problem for Cambodian students who want to become engineers," he told the Post on Sunday.

Vann Molyvann was at the forefront of the New Khmer Architecture movement that flourished under the patronage of then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the 1950s and 1960s.

He is responsible for many of Phnom Penh's most iconic structures, including Independence Monument and the National Sports Complex. Now 82 years old, he has worked abroad for much of his professional life, but resettled permanently in Cambodia in 1993.

Of 1,230 engineering graduates who took the AFEO exam this year, only 180 were certified, according to Prak Min, secretary general of the Board of Engineers, Cambodia (BEC). At a meeting on Thursday of the BEC, Deputy Prime Minister Sok An urged the group to train more engineers who meet AFEO requirements.

Prak Min said that Cambodian engineers compare favourably with those of other countries in the region, though he acknowledged that there is more work to be done.

Punching above its weight

Cambodia has more AFEO-certified architects than Laos or Myanmar, a number similar to Malaysia's, he said. Education and training issues, however, remain a challenge.

"Most of our students who graduate from engineering programmes need at least five to seven years of work experience before they can meet professional standards, but right now we have a shortage of jobs for them," Prak Min said.

He added that engineering students particularly need to improve their computer skills and their international language abilities, citing English and French in particular.

Civil society groups, Vann Molyvann argued, may play a role in reinvigorating Cambodian engineering.

Prior to the Khmer Rouge era, Cambodian students often took advantage of scholarships or government aid to study abroad - Vann Molyvann himself studied architecture in France.

But although increased international experience is one element that may improve the skills of Cambodian engineers, Vann Molyvann emphasised that domestic improvements, including the construction of new universities and the improvement of existing ones, would do the greatest good for the largest number of students. International donors, he said, should focus on these domestic projects as they work to address the education gap.

The architect added that Cambodia's turbulent past few decades have held back the development of engineering programmes.

Many of the Kingdom's most skilled professionals fled the country while the Khmer Rouge devastated most of the best Cambodian universities and training institutes, he said.

"In this situation, I call for all the Cambodian engineers who have fled abroad to please return to Cambodia to develop the craft and teach the people of the next generation to be skillful engineers like them," he said.

Vann Molyvann campaigns for a different urbanisation policy [-A call to the CPP deaf ears?]

29-09-2008
By Romain Roget
Cambodge Soir Hebdo in English
Click here to read the article in French

On Thursday 25 September, during a press conference at the French Cultural Centre, the architect presented his achievements dating from the periods between 1957 and 1970. He also called for the respect of structured city planning laws in the Kingdom.

After the visit on Sunday 21 September, Vann Molyvann once again attracted a large audience at the FCC’s cinema on Thursday evening. He opened the session by offering the French Ambassador a copy of the thesis he recently defended in Paris. Using this thesis as an example, as well as his book “Lessons from the Past”, Vann Molyvann retraced 13 years of construction, based on the wish to develop an authentic Khmer architecture. Describing his choices concerning the Chatomuk theatre, the “grey building”, or also the Olympic Stadium, he put the emphasis on natural ventilation at the heart of his works. He also talked in length about the social aspect of his works, mentioning examples like “the white building” and the garden city concept.

The Q&A session was the occasion for the architect to evoke the present and the future of Phnom Penh’s architecture. Reminding the existence of very strict laws, which he established himself as Minister of State in charge of the urbanisation during the 1990’s, he denounced the absence of political will to apply them. “It’s impossible to act as if such laws don’t exist in Cambodia”, he said, while emphasising that it’s no problem to build a tower as long as the law is respected.

Concerning Boeung Kak, he reminded the existence of a project established in cooperation with the town hall of Paris. This project intended to use the lake as a natural space and to preserve the housing of the lakeside residents.

Finally, he defended a urbanisation plan for the capital, as well as for the whole country, which would, according to him, make it possible to fight against the real-estate speculation and to develop the country in a harmonious way.

Deconstructing Cambodia's modernist heritage

Oct 27, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Building Cambodia by Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Leon Collins

Reviewed by Andrew Symon
Asia Times (Hong Kong)

PHNOM PENH - Despite the scars of war and strains of poverty, Cambodia's capital city is visually one of Asia's most attractive. Now with the peace-time rush towards modernity and cookie-cutter-shaped urban development threatening its unique and regionally unrivalled low-rise scale, Phnom Penh finds itself at important architectural crossroads.

Architect Helen Ross and historian Darryl Collins, two long-term residents of Cambodia, address this threatened heritage in their new compelling book, Building Cambodia: New Khmer Architecture: 1953-1970. A product of careful French colonial design in the early part of the 20th century, and a striking Khmer modernist architectural movement after independence in the 1950s and 1960s, the inland city nestles at the junction of the Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers.

As more money and people flow into the city to share in the new buoyancy of the Cambodian economy, nondescript, unimaginative glass tower architecture is beginning to erode the city's old world character. Arguably historical Phnom Penh is no longer protected by the time warp created by the lost years of the Khmer Rouge tyranny of the 1970s and the subsequent two decades of civil war, upheaval and economic stagnation.

Times are now better for Cambodians than they have been for the past 40 years. But whether the city can preserve its heritage and charm while making wise choices for future development - and avoid the fate of the now congested and mostly ugly Southeast Asian mega-cities elsewhere in the region - remains to be seen.

It is not just a matter of protecting French colonial period boulevards, villas and public buildings - of which the city has in virtually complete precincts. At risk also is a very Cambodian legacy in the many distinctive modernist buildings constructed in the 1950s and 1960s by largely Khmer architects.

It was a true local school of design - a "new Khmer architecture" - as it was described at the time. It expressed a fast lost golden age of optimism and modernization after independence in 1953. Yet this story, and the movement's architectural legacy, are not well appreciated - not internationally and perhaps even less so in Cambodia itself. Ross and Collins attempt to fill that gap in their magnificent multi-dimensional new work.

The book, a product of seven years of research and the beneficiary of a grant from Japan's Toyota Foundation, was launched in September at the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Thailand. Through a rich mix of contemporary and current photos, it documents an extraordinary period of construction.

After nearly a century of colonialism, there was a great nationalist excitement at being able to shape a new Cambodia and this was driven by a wave of public construction inspired by the country's mercurial head of government, Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

Young architects, engineers and town planners newly returned from studies overseas, mostly in France, enthusiastically combined Western modernist forms, materials and functions with traditional Cambodian designs, practices and local materials. They often drew on inspiration from the temples at the world-renowned ancient Angkor complex, although they did not seek to recreate its monumentalism.

One structure that especially stands out is the Institute of Languages, formerly the library for the teacher's training college. It is a small but striking circular building whose form was inspired by the traditional Khmer woven palm leaf hat still worn throughout the countryside - though the structure makes use of ribs of concrete rather than rattan.

Designed by Vann Molyvann, one of the most influential of the Khmer architects, and today still living in Phnom Penh, its circular concrete roof is indented with concrete rays and seems to almost float in a circular glass wall. Inside light is filtered by the careful location of windows so that the interior is not exposed to intense illuminant contrasts.

Architects like Molyvann (as well as the economists, political scientists and lawyers, including those who would lead the Khmer Rouge) who went abroad to study after World War II were the first Cambodians of any significant number to do so. They returned, Ross and Collins note, with both the new ideas of Western modernism - the simplification of form and design following function - with designs and motifs inspired by Cambodian historical and contemporary architectures built in harmony with the country's tropical environment.

For instance, glass was not used on the extensive scale common to Western modernist buildings of the era. Rather - and sensibly so - there was great reliance on open spaces and verandahs allowing natural ventilation. Water was often used as moats around buildings and in courtyard ponds. Spaces under buildings are common as well as roof terraces. Concrete was often combined with brick and stone.

The largest construction of the era is the National Sports Complex, finished in 1964 and built on a 40-hectare site originally designed to host the inaugural Southeast Asian Games in 1963 - but which in fact came to be held in Jakarta. The complex was also designed by Molyvann and made great use of earthworks to shape the site. Half a million cubic meters of earth were dug out of the site and piled up to create an elliptical stadium able to seat 60,000 people.

Royal builder

The authors set their story in the wider context of Cambodia's political and economic development over those years. At the heart of this expansion was Sihanouk, who believed that a widespread pubic construction program was a key to shaping a confident new Cambodia. In this pursuit, the royal figure reportedly saw himself in the tradition of the great Angkor kings of the country's ancient past, emulating in small scale their monumental architectural achievements.

While Sihanouk's leadership has often been criticized as verging on the dictatorial, leading in part perhaps to the country's later traumas, Ross and Collins argue the architecture he oversaw was certainly not that of an authoritarian state. There was diversity, subtlety and innovation and there were no monumental works that de-humanize by their scale. And construction was not just limited to government buildings, monuments, arts and sports centers, hotels and homes for the wealthy.

There were also uniquely constructed schools, university buildings, commercial offices, model factories, churches and private homes for the middle class as well as housing estates for low wage earners. Nor was building limited to just Phnom Penh; works were done all over Cambodia. And it was often meshed with astute town planning, as manifested in the expansion of Phnom Penh.

This was also seen in other newly independent countries in the period. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Cambodian experience brings to mind Indonesia and president Sukarno's promotion of urban development and architecture. But there seems nothing elsewhere quite like the coherence and extent of the Khmer modernist movement.

So impressed was Singapore's founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, with the new buildings and gardens of the well-planned Phnom Penh during his visit in 1967 that he saw it as a model for his vision of a modern Singapore. Vann Molyvann recalled decades later that Lee unsuccessfully requested Sihanouk to allow Cambodia's state architects to work in his city-state.

"The term 'new Khmer architecture' was in fact coined in the 1960s, but the detail of this school was later largely forgotten in Cambodia," Collins says. Collins originally came to Cambodia in 1994 as part of an Australian government-funded program to assist with the restoration of Phnom Penh's national museum. Ross, originally from the United Kingdom, moved to Phonm Penh in 1997 from Thailand after having worked on the development of Bangkok's rapid transit system.

Unfortunately, both authors note, much is now being lost or threatened through demolition and unregulated development as more money flows into Cambodia. For instance, chipping away at Molyvann's national sports center is a dense Taiwanese-invested office, shopping and apartment development which is being built literally to encircle the architectural masterpiece.

One of the greatest losses has been the Preah Suramarit national theater, which was opened in 1968 and also designed by Molyvann. Much of the building was gutted by fire in 1994 and no attempt at restoration followed. It has continued to be used by local musicians, dancers and singers as a place for rehearsals, but a recent deal between the Ministry of Culture and the locally-owned Royal Group has the structure scheduled for demolition.

Khmer-designed modernist buildings are at more risk than the old French colonial architecture and planning, Ross and Collins say. That's because the older European structures tend to be more accepted internationally for their heritage value than those of the more recent modernist style - although belatedly world bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization are making efforts to encourage preservation of the mid-20th century legacy.

"These buildings show a real Cambodian spirit," said Collins. "It was a real experiment that worked." So, too, does the authors' book in detailing how the vitality and promise of that short but golden era was captured in the then young country's architecture.

Building Cambodia: New Khmer Architecture 1953-1970 by Helen Grant Ross and Darry Leon Collins, including a preface by His Majesty King Shamoni. The Key Publisher, Bangkok, 2007. ISBN: 974934121. Price US$65, 333 pages.

Andrew Symon is a Singapore-based journalist and analyst specializing in energy and mining issues.

Vann Molyvann: "Heritage cannot be sold, changed or denied-now they are destroying it. Now they've sold our national heritage to a famed businessman"

Monday, July 16, 2007
Curtain call for an icon of Cambodia's artistic recuperation

Phnom Penh's Bassac Theatre has been drummer Nop Sambona's home since the Khmer Rouge were pushed from power 28 years ago, leaving behind a ruined country, its singers, dancers and musicians among the 1.7 million people murdered by the regime.

Cambodian artists training at the burnt-out Basac theather in Phnom Penh (AFP/File Tang Chhin Sothy)

PHNOM PENH (AFP) - Those who survived the apocalypse unleashed by the Khmer Rouge, which was particularly brutal in pursuing of Cambodia's artists, trickled back into the city and began trying to rebuild their lives.

The theatre became the soul of this battered community, a bright spot in an otherwise dead world that evoked a cultural richness which would never be fully revived.

Nearly three decades on that bright spot is dimming as the site on which Cambodia's national theatre sits has been leased to a private developer and the building doomed to be razed.

Its artists, who have soldiered on against darkness, wet and neglect since a fire gutted the auditorium and stage area in 1994, were offered 300 dollars each and told last month to leave.

"This place has produced hundreds of artists. The theatre produced the nation's great culture," says Nop Sambona, taking a break from what will be one of the last rehearsals to resonate through the Bassac's now derelict performance hall.

Cambodian artists training at the burnt-out Basac theather in Phnom Penh (AFP/File Tang Chhin Sothy)

"It's a landmark. We're so sorry that we've lost it," he says, gesturing over his shoulder at the Bassac's flame-blackened foyer.

Constructed in 1966, the 1,200-seat Bassac was designed by Vann Molyvann, Cambodia's most famous modern architect, as a monument to Cambodia's thriving performing arts scene.

It is not hard to imagine the capital's elite, dressed in elegant evening wear, gliding through the Bassac's imposing triangular foyer and up the cantilevered staircases suspended over shallow pools of water, about to view a performance of the Royal Ballet.

The Bassac was one of dozens of gems built by Vann Molyvann, whose wide boulevards and stunning public buildings transformed Phnom Penh from a tiny backwater into a graceful capital during Cambodia's short period of prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s.

The era, known as the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, or Cambodia's "golden age," also spurred on a strong revival in performing arts, with the Bassac at its heart.

"During the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, the government considered the theatre a part of our national heritage," an angry Vann Molyvann says. "Heritage cannot be sold, changed or denied -- now they are destroying it. Now they've sold our national heritage to a famed businessman."

A man rides past the Basac theather in Phnom Penh (AFP/File Tang Chhin Sothy)

Khim Sarith, secretary of state at the Ministry of Culture, says the site had been leased to Cambodian tycoon Kith Meng, who plans to develop a "cultural building".

In an earlier deal struck in 2005, Cambodia's culture ministry ceded land around the Bassac on the condition that the theatre be renovated, retaining its original name and architecture.

Kith Meng was to get an undisclosed amount of property around the theatre in exchange for building a conference centre and office blocks.

But Khim Sarith explains that the government is unable to afford the "millions of dollars" it would cost to restore the Bassac.

"The theatre will be knocked down because it is burned and is old," he says.

"There is nothing there," he says, adding the new theatre that Kith Meng has agreed to build elsewhere in exchange for the property "will be better than the old one".

Buth Choeun, chief of administration at the culture ministry's performing art department, says the theatre's state of decay has made it increasingly dangerous to work in.

"If we stay here it will be difficult for us -- we fear the old walls will fall on us," he says.

Vann Molyvann is not satisfied by the deal.

"They do not care about heritage," he says. "I am very worried. I have no hope that Cambodian artists can spread our culture anymore -- Cambodian culture will die.

"The land prices at that site have reached more than 1,000 dollars per square metre (yard). So it's no longer about national heritage."

Ieng Sithul, director of the Khmer Actress Association, says the proposed site for the new theatre is "not suitable," suggesting instead that the Bassac be restored.

"If the old site has a beautiful theatre, it will help add value to our culture," he says.

But like all of those facing eviction, he is heartbroken about the end of the Bassac.

"We have nothing but regret. We have only sympathy for the theatre and can only say goodbye to our poor home."

In the background Nop Sambona has begun rehearsing again, his drumming heard from behind a glass window on which someone in a desperate effort to stave off the inevitable has scrawled" "Please help to preserve, don't destroy."

Building Phnom Penh: An Angkorian heritage [- The soon-to-be-destroyed legacy of Architect Van Molyvann]

Architect Vann Molyvann

The library of the School of Foreign Languages in Phnom Penh, designed by Vann Molyvann. (Courtesy of Susan Schulman)

Tuesday, March 27, 2007
By Robert Turnbull The International Herald Tribune (Paris, France)

PHNOM PENH: Many Asian cities have laid claim to the title of "Paris of the East." During the 1930s, Phnom Penh's candidature was supported by no less a luminary than Charlie Chaplin, who described its orderly, tree-lined avenues as "little sisters" to the Champs-Elysées.

But today's visitors to Cambodia are surprised to discover that the true architectural legacy of this former French protectorate is not colonial at all, but a unique synthesis of postwar European modernism and what might be called "Angkorian vernacular."

"New Khmer Architecture" emerged from Cambodia's 15 years of prosperity following the end of French rule in 1953. The euphoria of independence spawned an entire school of designers and architects who, rather than replicate international styles, chose to reinterpret them according to a set of local conditions, foremost among them flooding and hot temperatures.

It was a kind of Asian Bauhaus in that its members worked concurrently and in a similar style.

The movement's influence was short-lived: few of its architects survived the Khmer Rouge. However, Vann Molyvann, the leader and most prolific member of the group, remains, at 80, an enterprising and respected figure, even if his work has yet to acquire the protection it so patently deserves.

The first Cambodian architect to be trained in Europe - at Paris's Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts - Vann returned to Cambodia in 1956. Introduced to the left-leaning King Norodom Sihanouk, the two spearheaded a campaign of urban development and construction that transformed Phnom Penh from a sleepy colonial backwater to a vibrant, ambitious capital.

From universities to sports facilities, the architect and his royal mentor created more than a hundred public projects throughout Cambodia, using funds from the Chinese, Russian and French governments as well as "nonaligned" states during the decade and a half before Cambodia was dragged into a regional war with the United States. The engineer Vladimir Bodiansky and the urbanist Gerald Hanning provided technical assistance.

Vann's imposing Independence Monument at the intersection of Sihanouk and Norodom boulevards symbolizes the era. Paying direct homage to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the chocolate-hued Phnom Penh structure built in 1960 is adorned, appropriately enough, with a profusion of nagas, the protective serpents of Hindu mythology.

Vann's 1964 National Sports Center, constructed before Kenzo Tange's Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, is as clear a statement of civic pride and for Sihanouk an attempt to proclaim the country's neutrality in the face of growing Cold War hostilities. Cambodia's rejection by the pro-Western International Olympic Committee prompted Sihanouk to join Ganefo (Games of the Nonaligned and Emerging Forces), a sporting event created by China, Russia and others. Cambodia's turn to host the Games came in 1966.

Though Vann shared Sihanouk's utopian vision, his inspiration is drawn from his own architectural heritage. The Sports Center's large ornamental pools directly imitate the barays, or reservoirs, surrounding Angkorian temples, while the elevated walkways at both his Cham Car Mon palace and the School of Foreign Languages pay homage to Angkor Wat's kilometer-long causeway.

Vann's signature suspended "zigzag" roof lines created artificial space to enable air to flow in what he describes as "a reworking of the concave shape of the temple roofs."

The other major influence was Le Corbusier and his complex theories of communal living. Vann's use of the Frenchman's "modular"' as a tool for establishing proportions is best emulated in the "White" and "Gray" buildings of the Front du Bassac, a development begun in 1964 to house foreign advisers and Ganefo's athletes.

"His buildings are like sculptures in the way they celebrate depth and space as well as light and darkness," said the architect today.

Assessing Phnom Penh at that time as "an active sedimentation zone with poor ventilation and prone to flooding," Vann found traditional solutions to mass housing in a rapidly expanding city. A new book, "Building Cambodia: 'New Khmer Architecture' (1953-1970)" by Darryl Leon Collins and Helen Grant Ross (The Key Publishers, Bangkok 2006) applauds the movement's aims and philosophy while establishing Vann as a seminal figure in postwar Asian architecture.

But while steadily collecting admirers abroad and celebrated by the more enlightened sections of Phnom Penh society, this architectural patrimony has not been protected by the authorities. Rather than celebrate the achievements of Sihanouk's "golden age," the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen seems to go to considerable lengths to undermine them.

To the dismay of international groups attempting to stimulate cultural continuity, Vann has been largely shunned by the political establishment in Cambodia. When Unesco organized a conference on how to protect this legacy and designated Vann as its head, it had to disinvite him after complaints by the government. Rarely consulted on the fate of his buildings, Vann has been forced to watch from the sidelines while his work has been ripped out or ineptly renovated.

The refurbishment of Vann's fan-shaped Chaktomuk Conference Hall met with the architect's general approval. However, the Taiwanese Yuanta Group's cosmetic makeover of the National Sports Center in 2000 robbed this voluminous site of a good deal of its land to make way for commercial development. "Economic tradeoffs with foreign developers result in short-term quick-fix solutions that ignore longterm planning," Collins said.

The latest building to attract scrutiny is a theater commissioned by Sihanouk in 1966 to promote Cambodia's performing arts. A masterpiece of concrete plasticity with staircases suspended over shallow pools of water, the Preah Suramarit was gutted by fire in 1994, devastating the auditorium and stage area. It has remained in its ruined state for more than a decade.

Only days after Cambodia's new King Norodom Sihamoni declared a desire to see the theater rebuilt, the government pre-emptively announced its sale to a local telecommunications company, which is expected to replace it with a conference hall and TV tower.

Given the minimal architectural merit, much less public interest to be found in the latest rash of government offices, casino and private villas, this is especially depressing.