Lu Ban Hap

Lu Ban Hap (1931 to 2023) was a Cambodian architect and city planner of the New Khmer Architecture movement, known for the White Building in Phnom Penh. The movement joined modern design with features of Khmer village houses, such as stilts against floods and V-shaped roofs against the sun, and it grew up with the Sangkum Reastr Niyum government of Norodom Sihanouk. As head of the city's housing and town planning office in the 1960s, Lu Ban Hap shaped many of the capital's parks, boulevards and public buildings.

The White Building in Phnom Penh, 2014. Photo: Myrmux, CC BY-SA 4.0

Historical figure details
Roles	Architect; Urban planner
Born	1931, Kampong Cham province
Died	June 25, 2023, Paris
Country	Cambodia
Subjects	Visual Arts & Design; History & Remembrance

Early life and training

He was born in 1931 in Kampong Cham province. At 14 he moved to Phnom Penh for secondary school. He had little money, lived at a Wat far from home, and kept up his lessons at night under a streetlight after the monks turned out the lamps. Penn Nouth, whom he had known as governor of Kampong Cham, took him in, saw him through school and remained his mentor.

In 1949 he was among the Cambodian students sent to Paris on scholarships. He first planned to become an engineer, but Vann Molyvann, who had reached Paris three years earlier, persuaded him to study architecture. Lu Ban Hap later recalled: "At that time, there were no qualified architects in Cambodia." After qualifying he hoped to work in Brazil on the new capital, Brasília, but Sihanouk wanted him home. He returned to Phnom Penh in 1960.

City planner

On his return he set up the Phnom Penh municipality's department of housing and town planning. The governor, Tep Phan, gave him a free hand to modernize the city's planning. With a staff of 12, he ran city planning and parks as well as waste collection, street lights, electricity and permits to build. He had the city's residents and buildings counted, so that schools and mosques could be placed where they were needed.

He created the public gardens around the White Building, a park around Boeung Kak lake modeled on the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and the long boulevard in front of the Independence Monument. Alongside his city post, he ran a private architecture office from his villa on Monivong Boulevard and later founded a construction company. His private commissions included universities, factories and villas for Sihanouk.

Works

In Phnom Penh he designed the Hotel Cambodiana on the riverfront, completed in 1969, and the Chenla Theatre, also known as the Phnom Penh cultural center. He designed the Kantha Bopha pavilion in the grounds of the Royal Palace. He also designed the Lycée Tuol Svay Prey, a secondary school that became the S-21 prison under the Khmer Rouge and afterward the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

Outside the capital, his buildings included the provincial hall of Kandal, a sports center in Battambang, a royal residence on Kirirom mountain and a university building in Kampong Cham. In 1968 he built Villa Romonea in the seaside town of Kep.

White Building

In 1963 he designed the White Building with the engineer Vladimir Bodiansky. The municipality first meant it to house athletes at the Southeast Asian Games, and it opened in 1963 under the name Municipal Apartments, with homes at low rents.

Its design drew on the Khmer timber house. Each apartment had a front space for living and sleeping and a back space for cooking and the toilet, with a door between them. Like a house on stilts, the building rose above an open ground floor, which served for community life and parking and kept it clear of floods. About 300 meters (980 feet) long, it was made up of six blocks joined by open staircases.

Moritz Henning writes that the building is often wrongly credited to Vann Molyvann. Lu Ban Hap did not count it among his favorite designs. "It was not my own project," he said of it. The White Building was torn down in July 2017 for a new development.

War and exile

When Lon Nol took power in 1970, Lu Ban Hap's long-range plans for the city came to a halt, and many of his colleagues left the country. He stayed in Phnom Penh out of a sense of duty to Cambodia. When the Khmer Rouge entered the city in 1975, he was evacuated with the rest of the population to a rural labor camp. After three months he escaped and walked, mostly at night, to Saigon, then flew by way of Hanoi, Vientiane and Bangkok to Paris.

In Paris he fitted out restaurant interiors. In 1978 he designed and built his own house there, and later a house next door for Penn Nouth, who came to Paris in 1979. He first went back to Cambodia in 1989 to support the aid group Médecins du Monde, and until 1994 he returned every year to oversee the building of orphanages and hospitals.

Lu Ban Hap died in Paris on June 25, 2023, at the age of 92. Ly Rasmey, a secretary of state in Cambodia's land planning ministry, called his death a great loss for the nation.

Legacy

The Vann Molyvann Project names Lu Ban Hap, with Mam Sophana, among the major figures of New Khmer Architecture beside Vann Molyvann. The architect Pen Sereypagna has called him very important to the movement. Martin Aerne, an architecture professor at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, has judged his work more formal and less closely tied to Cambodian traditions than Vann Molyvann's.

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