AsiaLIFE

Possibly no man alive has had more influence on Phnom Penh’s architecture than Vann Molyvann. In an exclusive interview with AsiaLIFE, Cambodia’s master architect explains the development of the capital from the French Protectorate to modern times, providing some advice to young architects and overseas Khmers along the way.

Cambodia was placed under the French Protectorate from 1863 to 1953. By 1863, the territory of the Kingdom of Cambodia, the last remnant of the old Empire of Angkor, had been reduced to around 100,000sqkm and was inhabited by about one million people living primarily from a subsistence rural economy. Phnom Penh, the biggest city, could not have had more than 25,000 inhabitants. Udong, the former royal capital, had perhaps 10,000 inhabitants, while Battambang had only about 3,000 inhabitants.

During the Protectorate, French administrative and private interests were established to the south and east of the site of the Phnom Daun Penh. These settlements were protected from the annual floods by building dykes and using soil dug from drainage to fill land to the level of the dykes. Ancient roads and paths became the new boulevards of the city. A canal dug around the periphery of the city limited its northern extension.

It is likely that this peripheral canal, tracing the limit of the cities to the west, followed a natural depression or was dug on the trace of an ancient city moat. Likewise, the boulevard which boarded it (present day Monivong Boulevard) make use of an existing embankment which might be the remains of the encircling wall built by King Pohnhea Yat, after the abandonment of Angkor in the middle of 15th century. To the south, a dyke then called the “Annamite Wall” (present‐day Sihanouk Boulevard) became the limit of the city.

Town Planning under the French Protectorate (1863‐1953)

The first modern Plan of Extension of Phnom Penh was elaborated by Ernest Hebrard, French architect‐town planner by 1937. The Plan introduced a vast programme of modernisation and promoted a new architecture.

The Plan which delimited the new geographic urban space put great emphasis on the ethnic characteristics of the inhabitants. Phnom Penh was clearly divided into four different neighbourhoods which were juxtaposed from north to south along the Bassac River and which were identified by the groups of population residing there. The north, around the Phnom, was for the European district bordered by a canal.

Further south, around the central market, the Chinese district was centred on the market, limited to the north by the canal and to the south by the royal esplanade called the “veal mean”. To these districts were added a Vietnamese district to the west of the Cambodian district, and an old “Catholic district” (mainly occupied by Vietnamese and Malays) to the north of the European district. Neighbourhoods were limited to the south by a canal.

As it was not possible to proceed with land acquisition through costly expropriations, the municipal authorities put all their efforts on the programme of extensions. The town was proposed to extend to the east, on the Chruuy Changwar Peninsula, which would become a modern industrial zone, next to a new deep water port foreseen on the western side of the Mekong River, and a residential zone on the southern part of the peninsula, designed to be the administrative centre of the capital with the residence of the Governor, at the point of the peninsula.

Town Planning during the Sangkum Era (1953‐1970)

In 1953, Phnom Penh became the capital of the independent nation of Cambodia. Under the leadership of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, then Head of State, ambitious public works projects were undertaken in the capital and throughout the Kingdom.

The necessity of rapidly designing and constructing buildings to house the institutions of the newly independent State led to major public works projects which encouraged architectural experimentation. The emphasis was on developing a new national identity and affirming Cambodia’s role on the international stage. Through the realisation of numerous public buildings and infrastructure, as well as migration from the countryside to the city, Phnom Penh doubled its surface area in less than fifteen years.

Guiding Principles of the 1960s Urban Master Plan

The Master Plans of Phnom Penh adopted during the French Protectorate were established according to the doctrines of the Societe Francaise des Urbanistes in Paris, founded after World War One, which pleaded that the urban process should be concerned with social housing and public health programmes; it should imply infrastructure works, creation of sewerage and water supply systems, electricity networks as well as parks and gardens.

The town‐planners of the Societe Francaise des Urbanistes used as reference the movement of garden cities, which Ebenezer Howard developed in the United Kingdom in 1898. Howard published a revolutionary book entitled ‘Tomorrow a Peaceful Path to Real Reform’, re-edited under the title ‘Garden Cities of Tomorrow’. The movement recommended the creation of new suburban towns, correctly designed, of limited size, and surrounded by an inviolable belt of agricultural land (what was later called the green belt). The influence of the theory of the garden cities continued to assert itself in the town planning sector, all along the twentieth century.

Thirty years later, in 1928, a Swiss Architect Le Corbusier presented for Paris a Master Plan called “le Plan Voisin”. Le Corbusier and Ebenezer Howard were dramatically in opposition, on the subject of an urban future, of a vertical or a horizontal town, on how the town should become in the future in matters of population density.

Le Corbusier wished to increase this density, his Plan Voisin replaced in a very radical way the large French style of boulevards of Baron Hausmann, boarded by trees and lined up with uniformly proportioned buildings, by blocks of high‐rise cruciform buildings. Le Corbusier imagined that these cruciform buildings would free large green spaces, creating more parks in the town. Howard thought that the density of urban populations should not be that high, that it would overload the density of land occupation. On the contrary, he aspired to realise a synthesis of the advantages of the rural country and of the town.

During the Sangkum Era, the style adopted by city planners and architects for the new buildings of the capital was the vocabulary of the modern movement adapted to the Khmer context. This style was used to construct emblematic buildings of the young State such as universities, ministries, and a national sports complex.

Large areas of the cities were turned into landscaped gardens surrounding water reservoirs. Coverings and cloisters of concrete protected buildings against the piercing light and hot sun. Protecting buildings from flooding was effectively made by raising the dwellings on piles, such as the wooden houses the Cambodians have used for centuries. A characteristic style developed along the new grand boulevards of the city after independence, one accentuating the character of Phnom Penh as a “garden city”.

The White and Grey Buildings

The Bassac River Front operation was a housing project initially intended to house the athletes for the South Asian Games to be held in Phnom Penh. It constituted for us an experimentation of a new type of housing, the “Habitat du Grand Nombre” (mass production of apartments), conceived on the model of Le Corbusier’s Unites d’Habitation, which had been tested immediately after World War Two by the French government in their programmes of post‐war reconstruction.

We designed the plans of the “White Building”, a linear apartment bloc divided in two parts of 120m and 320m. These blocs are on piles, containing 164 duplex type apartments, oriented east‐west. The duplex apartments were organised around an open space, the loggias, which grouped all the family’s activities. These apartments were cross ventilated. By French standards, they were in the category of the “Habitation a` Loyer Modere” (Middle Class Apartment).

We also designed the plans of the “Grey Building”, a linear group of six apartment blocks, of three to four floors, measuring altogether 325m. The six blocs were linked by exterior staircases and corridors, which had openings to the east and the west.

Towards the extremities, the blocks, two in the south and one in the north, had four levels, the three central blocs had three levels. Therefore, one could accede to the terraces and walk on the whole length of all the blocks. On each floor, the interior corridors were prolonged by the exterior ones, and creating then real roads of more than 300m long. The Grey Building was built for civil servants to allow them to acquire private ownership of apartment in payment of modest rents corresponding to their salaries.

Of Modern Times

In the 1960s, there were drastic changes, both economic and structural in the group of Southeast Asian countries engaged in the path of liberal economies: Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. From 1960 to 1990, the rhythm of urbanisation sped up in all the countries of this group and the impetus, which provoked this acceleration, was due to a great part to the growth of the industrialisation and of the globalisation of the world economies.

The model of such a development type had been tested in South Korea. This was an advanced industrial economy, which gave up its domestic production of export products and implemented in place its own process of trans‐nationalisation of investment. The towns of Seoul and Pusan became Mega‐Urban Regions and have absorbed the major part of the increase of the national population. The Mega Urban Region of Seoul‐Incheon‐Kyonggi in 1990 reached 18 million inhabitants. More than just a polarisation of development in the cities, the appearance of the Mega Urban Regions directly affects the living conditions of the population.

For Khmer urban planners, developers and architects, my advice is that we should adapt to the present economic context, we should totally change the scale of our current planning exercise, and enlarge the town planning of mega poles to the planning of Mega Urban Regions.

Becoming a Doctor

Since 1994, I undertook a “Comparative and critical study of the traditional planning of the ancient cities of Angkor and of the planning of the modern Khmer cities”. This research resulted in 1999 in the publication of a first book in French entitled ‘Cites Khmeres anciennes’, a second book entitled “Modern Khmer Cities”, in English in 2003, in Khmer in 2004 and early 2008 in French.

From 2005 to 2008 this research was extended to the cities of Southeast Asia and resulted in a doctorate thesis entitled ‘Cites du Sud‐Est Asiatique–le passe et le present’. This thesis was presented in June 2008 at the University of Paris and I obtained the Degree of Doctor in Architecture with congratulations of the jury.

I would like to dedicate this thesis to the Cambodian Youth, and in particular to Khmer students living abroad so as to incite them to return to their homeland. Existing Khmer history books do not mention important parts of the prehistory of our country. Also the students often ignore all of the recent past, in particular of the Khmer Rouge period. The aim of this thesis is to try to fill this gap.