New Khmer Architecture

New Khmer Architecture (ស្ថាបត្យកម្មខ្មែរថ្មី) is the modern architecture movement of Cambodia between independence in 1953 and 1970. It joined Western modernist ideas and new materials with Cambodian building traditions, from the temples of Angkor to the raised wooden houses of the countryside. Its best-known architect is Vann Molyvann.

History details
Khmer name	ស្ថាបត្យកម្មខ្មែរថ្មី
History type	Movement
Start	1953
End	1970
Present-day countries	Cambodia
Subjects	Visual Arts & Design; History & Remembrance

Name

Pen Sereypagna, the director of the Vann Molyvann Project, traces the term to state magazines and books of the 1960s, printed in French and English. He thinks it was probably known mainly to diplomats, politicians and educated Cambodians. Interest in the movement grew after Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Leon Collins published their book Building Cambodia: "New Khmer Architecture" 1953–1970 in 2006. Writing in The Phnom Penh Post in 2015, Moritz Henning called the book the foundation for a renewed appreciation of the period's buildings. The architect Ross and the art historian Collins began cataloging the buildings while they taught at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh.

History

Norodom Sihanouk formed his party, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, in 1955 and won the election that year. Its name later came to stand for the whole period from 1953 to 1970. Under Sihanouk's patronage, many large public projects across the country, among them schools, universities and cultural institutions, were built in the new style. Cambodia's neutrality in the Cold War brought money from both blocs for infrastructure and culture, and Pen Sereypagna reads the architecture both as a Cambodian identity and as a political statement of the Sangkum era. From 1953 to 1970 the population of Phnom Penh grew from 370,000 to 1,000,000.

Vann Molyvann came back from his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1956 and was put in charge of state buildings. His public works include the Chaktomuk Conference Hall (1961), the Independence Monument, the National Sports Complex (1962 to 1964) and the Institute of Foreign Languages (1965 to 1972).

The Vann Molyvann Project names Lu Ban Hap and Mam Sophana as the movement's other major figures. Lu Ban Hap came back from Paris in 1960 to set up the city's department of housing and town planning. With the engineer Vladimir Bodiansky he designed the White Building (1963), and his other works include the Hotel Cambodiana and the Chenla Theatre. In 2008 The Phnom Penh Post also named Henri Chatel and Ung Krapum Phka among the architects of the capital's major public works. Architects and engineers from Japan, Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States worked with Cambodians on many of the large projects.

The style was taken up for private houses as well. Ron Gluckman wrote in 2008 that about 1,300 new buildings went up in Phnom Penh in less than two decades. Pen Sereypagna dates the movement's end to 1970, when the Sangkum regime fell. The design magazine Icon writes that the wars of the 1970s and 1980s cut the era short.

Features

The Vann Molyvann Project lists four traits. Reinforced concrete was the main new material, and buildings referred to older Cambodian ways of building, above all raising them on stilts. They answered the tropical climate with shade and natural airflow, and they used little ornament, mostly bas-reliefs drawn from Angkorian temple decoration.

Raised floors kept buildings clear of floods and let air pass underneath. Screened or cut-away walls gave shade, and high roofs helped the air move, so the buildings needed less air conditioning. Public buildings were often low and set among ponds or moats in the manner of Angkor, under steep triangular roofs that recall its temples. At the National Sports Complex, the water around the stadium recalls the moats of Khmer settlements. At the Institute of Foreign Languages, a roof of hexagonal concrete tubes lets warm air out and soft light into the main hall. The apartments of the White Building were modeled on the raised Khmer house, which left the ground floor open for the community and safe from floods.

Helen Grant Ross has described the style as an authentic one that arose in Cambodia on its own, not a copy of European work.

The buildings were part of the wider culture of the time. They appear in many of the films made in Cambodia after 1960, and Khmer rock music was played in them. Sihanouk showed them in his own films and photographs, and visiting heads of state were driven past them along the main boulevard.

Losses

Pen Sereypagna writes that the construction boom after 2000, with no plan for the city and no law protecting buildings of the 1960s, led to many of them being privatized and torn down. The Cable News Network reported in 2017 that the official records of the buildings were lost in the civil war, so no one knows how many are gone.

In 2008 two of Vann Molyvann's works were demolished: the Preah Suramarit National Theatre, which had burned during renovation in 1994, and the Council of Ministers. The White Building was demolished in July 2017. Vann Molyvann told Next City in 2013 that it was hard to watch "the destruction of my children".

Khmer Architecture Tours, founded in 2004, leads tours of the buildings and researches them. The Vann Molyvann Project, started in 2009 by Cambodian and international students, surveys and documents Vann Molyvann's work.

References