Maurice Glaize

Maurice Glaize (1886 to 1964) was a French architect who served as Conservator of Angkor and wrote a 1944 guide to its monuments. From 1936 to 1946 he rebuilt and cleared temples across the Angkor area for the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), and his guide went through many editions.

Maurice Glaize at Angkor, 1936.

Historical figure details
Roles	Architect; Conservator of Angkor
Period	1936 to 1946
Born	December 1886, Paris, France
Died	July 17, 1964, La Rochelle, France
Associated with	École française d'Extrême-Orient, Angkor
Country	France; Cambodia
Subjects	History & Remembrance; Visual Arts & Design

Early life and training

Glaize was born in Paris in December 1886. He came from a family of artists: his grandfather was a decorative painter and his father an architect. He trained under H. Deglane at the École des beaux-arts in Paris. In 1913 he applied to join the EFEO, but he was ranked second, behind Georges Demasur. Called up in 1914, he served in a balloon unit. He received his architect's diploma in 1919, worked for a cooperative that rebuilt the town of Rethel, and then opened his own practice in Paris.

Indochina and Africa (1928 to 1936)

The Crédit foncier et Union immobilière d'Indochine hired Glaize to run its office in Phnom Penh. From 1928 to 1930 he oversaw the building of factories, shops and houses there, as well as the future Hôtel Royal, and he sat on Cambodia's Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture. He then worked in Saigon until 1934. The Angkor Database calls him the city's chief architect from 1930; the EFEO dates his Saigon years from 1931 and names him an expert architect for the civil court. He went back to Paris in 1934 and then to Dakar, where he worked for the Crédit foncier de l'Ouest africain until 1936.

At Angkor (1936 to 1946)

Glaize applied to the EFEO again. He joined its Angkor conservation office as a permanent member on December 1, 1936. The following year he succeeded Georges Trouvé as Conservator of the monuments of Angkor, a post he held until 1945.

His work ranged from clearing and strengthening temples to taking them apart and rebuilding them. He cleared and consolidated the East Mebon from 1937 to 1939, Phnom Krom in 1938 and Phnom Bok in 1939. He partly reassembled Neak Poan in 1938 and 1939, and from 1939 to 1946 he worked on Preah Khan, the Bayon and the north gate of Angkor Thom. On November 13, 1939, during the restoration of Preah Khan, he found the temple's foundation stele lying on the ground in its first eastern gateway.

His largest projects used anastylosis, the method of taking a monument down and rebuilding it with its original stones. He applied it to the entrance pavilion of Preah Palilay in 1937 and 1938 and to the main temple on top of the Bakong pyramid from 1936 to 1944. At the Bakong, where he continued the work in 1937, he had to sort the stones of a vanished sanctuary from the rubble, group them by molding and decoration and work out where each belonged. By the end of the year the tower stood again up to the cornice of its first stepped-back level. He rebuilt the whole sanctuary at Banteay Samre, from 1936 to 1946 or 1944, and worked by anastylosis at the West Mebon, from 1943 to 1944 or from December 1942 to December 1944. At the West Mebon he had already found, in 1936, the remains of a bronze Vishnu, which went to the National Museum in Phnom Penh.

Henri Marchal had first used anastylosis at Banteay Srei at the end of 1931. Jean Boisselier, in his 1993 preface to the guide, credited Glaize with generalizing its use. The EFEO credits him with scaling the method to the resources available and to the value and condition of each building. It also credits his restorations with clarifying the Bakong's chronology and the role of architectural symbolism at Neak Poan and the West Mebon. He set out his thinking on adapting anastylosis to Khmer monuments in the Cahiers de l'EFEO in 1941, and he wrote studies of Phnom Krom, Neak Poan and Preah Palilay.

Japanese occupation forces arrested Glaize in Siem Reap on March 12, 1945, together with his wife and two of their children. They were sent to Phnom Penh and held under house arrest in a crowded townhouse.

Glaize left Cambodia for France in August 1946. Jacques Lagisquet succeeded him at the Conservation d'Angkor, and his Cambodian secretary, Mok Tourn, kept the work going.

The guide to Angkor

After the guides of Henri Parmentier and Henri Marchal, Glaize wrote a new guide to Angkor, Les Monuments du groupe d'Angkor. The bookseller and publisher Albert Portail brought it out in Saigon in 1944. George Coedès, then director of the EFEO, wrote the preface to the first edition. He noted that Glaize had been in close daily contact with the ruins from 1936 on and wrote that, "like a professor of anatomy," he showed his readers "all the details of their structure."

The guide was reissued in 1948 and in Paris in 1963. Known in French as "le Glaize," it became the standard guide for French-speaking visitors and went through six later editions. The EFEO counts many official and pirated reprints and calls it the reference work for visitors to the site. Boisselier called it the most complete of the guidebooks to Angkor. An English translation of the fourth French edition carries his 1993 preface.

Later life

In 1947, after an extended leave in France, Glaize gave up returning to Cambodia. He settled in La Rochelle and took part in rebuilding the city. He died in La Rochelle on July 17, 1964.

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