• 1 Vann Molyvann was born in Kampot in 1926. His reputation as an exemplary modern architect has, in (...)
• 2 “National Sports Complex of Cambodia,” World Monuments Fund, 2016, URL: https://www.wmf.org/projec (...)

1The National Sports Complex in Phnom Penh, designed by Vann Molyvann and completed in 1964, is one of the city’s largest structures, and one of its busiest and most beloved public spaces (fig. 1).1 In 2016, the World Monuments Fund listed the Stadium—as it is colloquially known—as one of the world’s irreplaceable treasures. In their official statement, the organization called the Stadium “an iconic symbol of the massive post-independence effort that transformed Cambodia from an agrarian colony into a modern state,” and suggested that “the design is one of the most important examples of regionally inflected modernism.”2 But what exactly is the nature of the “iconic symbolism” embedded in this building, and what does it mean to claim that its design is “regionally inflected”? These questions will guide what follows.

• 3 My research in the United States of America’s National Archives and Records Administration in Coll (...)

4My argument here will be based in three related approaches to the Stadium, which correspond to three related understandings of the domestic. The first looks at the politico-historical context of the building’s construction, and specifically at how the Stadium can be seen as an emblem of Cambodia’s policy of Cold War nonalignment, called “neutralism” (in Khmer, apyiakrit), under Prince Sihanouk’s rule. This draws primarily on archival work in Cambodia and the United States.3 The second is essentially iconographic: it considers visual and spatial references to stilted wooden houses in the Stadium’s built form, as well as the repetition of architectural features from the Stadium and other large-scale public buildings designed by Vann Molyvann and his peers in smaller, anonymously designed private houses from the period. The third is spatial and experiential: a reflection on the internal division of spaces within the Stadium into numerous smaller-scaled zones. This mitigates a sense of the Stadium as monumental. These three methods of analysis also represent three conceptions of the domestic, which, while differing, should be understood as linked. The historical and the formal are always already related, of course, but an analysis which synthesizes multiple approaches is especially advantageous in a setting like Cambodia, given the loss and dispersal of many historical sources during the years of civil war and under the Khmer Rouge regime which followed the post-independence boom epitomized by the Stadium.

• 4 The tax on ice and “a local type of ice cream” was five percent; the tax on alcohol was one riel p (...)
• 5 Vann Molyvann, Modern Khmer Cities, op. cit. (note 1), p. 157–160.
• 6 Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Leon Collins, Building Cambodia: “New Khmer Architecture” 1953-1970, B (...)

5It is a surprisingly little-known fact that Phnom Penh’s National Stadium was built with funds raised by a special national tax imposed on ice, alcohol, and ice cream: items regularly consumed by many Cambodians from diverse class and other backgrounds.4 I came across records of this special Stadium tax while conducting archival research in early 2015, in the United States National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Before then, it was not known by any of the many Cambodian architectural history enthusiasts I know and is not mentioned in Molyvann’s own retrospective account of the Stadium’s construction.5 The sole monograph on modern Cambodian architecture, co-authored by architecture historians Helen Ross and Darryl Collins, states only that the Stadium’s 30 million dollar construction cost “came out of the national budget” but provides no further details or citations;6 Ross and Collins’ extensive research in preparing their foundational survey did not include the US National Archives in Maryland.

• 7 Ingrid Muan, “Playing with Powers: the Politics of Art in Newly Independent Cambodia,” Udaya, Jour (...)
• 8 College Park, MD (United States), United States of America National Archives and Records Administr (...)

6Given the bountiful investments in construction and built space offered as “aid” by the US, Soviet and Chinese governments in the years preceding the Stadium’s 1963 construction, it can be safely assumed that Prince Sihanouk could easily have sought international sponsorship for the ambitious Stadium project. Just three years earlier, it had been US “aid” which had funded construction of Vann Molyvann’s first major public building, the Chaktomuk Conference Hall, completed in 1961, also in Phnom Penh.7 This is a somewhat inconvenient fact which is today flatly denied by some senior officials at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, which owns and manages the building. In the same year as the Stadium’s construction, the United States presented an enormous exhibition of agricultural and industrial machinery on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, which attracted over 200,000 visitors.8 But the United States was far from the only international sponsor in terms of either financial “aid” or expert assistance. In 1960, the renowned author Han Suyin characterized the situation in neutralist Cambodia as follows:

• 10 This is the translation most often used in scholarly and other sources. See David Chandler, The Tr (...)
• 11 Klairung Amratisha, “The Cambodian Novel: A Study of its Emergence and Development,” PhD Thesis, S (...)
• 12 Norodom Sihanouk and Wilfred Burchett, My War with the C.I.A.: Cambodia’s Fight for Survival, Harm (...)
• 13 For a detailed discussion of this Boulevard in relation to performances made by Sihanouk’s Royal B (...)

8That Sihanouk chose not to seek sponsorship from any foreign governments for the Stadium’s construction suggests that the Stadium served as not only an outcome but also a symbol of Cambodia’s policy of neutrality during the Prince’s rule as Head of State over a regime called the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, or “People’s Socialist Community” (1955-1970).10 This is consistent with Sihanouk’s general approach to the arts and culture, which he affirmed had a duty to help “build the nation.” The arts, the Prince repeatedly proposed, should demonstrate a strength “appropriate to the independent status of the country”:11 with “independence” repeatedly articulated by Sihanouk and others as a byword for Cold War nonalignment or neutralism.12 To perform this neutralist rhetorical function—and thus also to avoid being subject to a politicized naming battle, as was the Khmer American Friendship Boulevard, later renamed the Russian Boulevard, and many other foreign-sponsored construction projects at the time13—the Stadium needed to be independently funded, and thus a special tax was necessary. The government’s choice of goods to tax is particularly poetic.

• 14 “1963 SEAP Games May Be Financial Problem.” College Park, MD (United States), United States of Ame (...)

9Ice, ice cream, and alcohol—the only items chosen for the special tax that funded the National Stadium’s construction—are consumables that may appear to be luxuries, and yet that are also widely considered by Cambodians to be necessities in the tropical climate. And so, too, construction of the Stadium may be seen to have been at once an ambitious extravagance—especially in a moment of national budget deficit, as other archival records reveal14—and an essential component in Sihanouk’s project of (literal and rhetorical) nation building. More than any other single structure built during the Sangkum Reastr Niyum period, the Stadium performed rhetorically to articulate Cambodian modern nationhood. And here, more clearly than in any other single project, we can discern the centrality of a neutralist posture to the Sangkum’s cultural and political identity.

• 15 According to Sihanouk, “We would be condemned by history if we permitted Cambodia to become not on (...)

10The Stadium tax was “domestic” not only in the sense of being raised within the country, rather than from foreign contributions, but also in the sense that it delegated the responsibility for funding into the domestic environment, the private home. Most Cambodian households would have contributed to the Stadium’s construction through payment of the tax on ice, ice cream, and alcohol: items which most Cambodian households consume. The significant effect of this is not only that most households would have therefore contributed to the cost of the Stadium’s construction, but also that most households thereby also participated in and contributed to the policy of neutralism. Cambodia’s Cold War nonalignment was not only a political position held by Sihanouk and the nation’s rulers; it was a stance that was thrust upon and embraced by many sections of the population. The special tax for the Stadium is best understood as having operated in tandem with contemporaneous nationalist narratives that conflated Cambodia’s independence with its neutralist stance.15 These intensified as the war in Vietnam escalated.

• 16 Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Leon Collins, Building Cambodia, op. cit. (note 6), p. 212.
• 17 Kosuke Matsubara, “Japanese Collaborators in the Golden Age of Modern Khmer City and Architecture (...)
• 18 Masaaki Iwamoto, “The Roles of Foreign Experts in the Cambodian Modern Movement of 1950-60s: Focus (...)

11One especially clear way in which Phnom Penh’s National Stadium, and several other large-scale state-sponsored projects such as the Bassac Riverfront Complex (which we will return to later), embodied Cambodian neutralism was in their omnivorous adoption of expert assistance from both the “Free World” and the Soviet bloc. The funding was domestic, but the technical team was decidedly transnational, a fact which reinforces an understanding of this grand architectural project as both an outcome and a symbol of Sihanouk’s policy of non-alignment, as a result of which, as Han Suyin quipped, “Cambodia gets help from everyone.” Ross and Collins note that French as well as Russian engineers worked with Cambodians on the National Stadium.16 Historian Kosuke Matsubara’s archival research reveals that French-trained Japanese architects Gyoji Banshoya and Nobuo Goto also worked on the Stadium, and that this experience inspired Nobuo to embark on an extensive research project on Cambodian stilted wooden housing. Nobuo’s research resulted in a proposal for a new model of low-cost housing, based on the stilted form and constructed in wood (fig. 2). The proposal was titled “Habitat experimental,” and which was published in French journal L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui.17 Further archival and interview-based research by Masaaki Iwamoto reveals that at least 23 of Vann Molyvann’s projects involved collaboration with foreign experts, of at least seven nationalities.18

• 19 Darryl Collins, “Vann Molyvann: Situating the Work of Cambodia’s Most Influential Architect,” Pers (...)
• 20 Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Leon Collins, Building Cambodia, op. cit. (note 6), p. 207.
• 21 Ibid., p. 208.

12Yet the contributions made by transnational architects and engineers—from across the Cold War political spectrum—has not been the focus of previous studies of the Stadium and its construction; instead, most accounts have cast the Stadium’s construction in national terms, as “Angkorian.” While this approach has emphasized national rather than transnational factors in the building of the Stadium, it has done so through a consistent emphasis on the structure’s references to grand temples, rather than to domestic stilted housing. This has the effect of enfolding the story of the Stadium into a narrowly cultural nationalist narrative, rather than seeing its intersections with a broader regional vocabulary of vernacular built forms. For example, in both a sole-authored journal article and in the aforementioned monograph co-authored with Ross, Collins stresses the “astonishing” speed of the Stadium’s construction, which was completed in eighteen months.19 Ross and Collins repeatedly note the “spectacular” and “remarkable” speed of the project, which they claim is especially “astounding” in “a small country like Cambodia,” and suggest that while the “logistics behind such a complex design are demanding in any circumstances […] in Cambodia, it was a feat to achieve the construction of this mammoth work, which is on a scale of the Angkor monuments themselves.”20 The combination of the size of the project, the smallness and “limited technology” of Cambodia, and the rapidity of the Stadium’s construction are hailed as “an Angkorian challenge.”21

• 22 This is an observation drawing on numerous conversations with Cambodian friends and colleagues fro (...)

13While a fair characterization in many ways, viewed historiographically such hyperbolic emphasis on “speed” and “scale” are also a testament to the seductive power of nationalist and progressivist views of modernization, amplified in the Cambodian context by a pervasive nostalgia for the post-independence period before civil war and violent revolution. The Stadium is today loved and celebrated by Cambodian architects and enthusiasts born in the generation after 1979, not only for the spaces it provides, but also for its status as a symbol of the imagined “golden age” of Sihanouk’s regime. Since its construction, the Stadium has been closely linked to Sihanouk, its patron (fig. 3). According to the nationalist teleology, the Prince’s rule as Head of State in the Sangkum era was a time in which Cambodia momentarily recuperated the grand ambition and achievements of the Angkorian period,22 only to have this post-independence promise quashed by civil war following Sihanouk’s overthrow in 1970, then the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975, the subsequent Vietnamese invasion/liberation from 1979, and finally decades of autocratic rule by the increasingly unpopular prime minister Hun Sen.

• 23 Vikramāditya Prakāsh, “Béton Brut and the Rough Poetry of Le Corbusier’s Capitol in Chandigarh,” i (...)
• 24 Writing of deliberately rough-surfaced concrete such as this in the “brutalist” buildings of Le Co (...)
• 25 The Vann Molyvann Project was founded by Canadian architect Bill Greaves, but Pen Sereypagna has t (...)
• 26 “The Vann Molyvann Project Summer School 2015,” The Vann Molyvann Project, n.d. URL: http://www.va (...)

15One photograph from Molyvann’s personal collection, showing the construction of the Stadium, is especially representative of this widespread tendency (fig. 4). In this image, the Stadium’s concrete structure rises as if of the architect’s singular volition, or as if of its own divine will—no construction workers are visible. This is a striking contrast to the kinds of photographs kept and published by Le Corbusier, the architect who Molyvann has often professed to most admire. Corbusier’s construction images typically featured numerous anonymous, sometimes even faceless construction workers. These men and women are, as architectural historian Vikramāditya Prakāsh has written, “classic subaltern subject[s], silenced and unrepresented.”23 Literal traces of their role in the process of constructing large-scale buildings are imprinted in the rough and manifestly hand-rendered surfaces of the raw concrete, or béton brut, from which the brutalist style derives its name.24 The photograph of the Stadium’s construction was chosen by Cambodian urban scholar Pen Sereypagna as the promotional image for a research project organized by the Vann Molyvann Project team, under Sereypagna’s leadership, in Phnom Penh in 2015.25 This selection, as well as the popularity which the image enjoyed among the Cambodian participants in the project, and among the thousands of Cambodians who actively followed its progress through online social media (and joined events organized by the project), together demonstrate the image’s continuing appeal more than half a century after the Stadium’s construction.26

• 27 Quoted in Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Leon Collins, Building Cambodia, op. cit. (note 6), p. 205. (...)
• 28 Vann Molyvann, Modern Khmer Cities, op. cit. (note 1), p. 160.

16Molyvann himself has participated actively in the rhetorical coupling of the Stadium with Angkor. In the year of its completion, he asserted that “modernity should not be inspired superficially by Western ideas that destroy all traces of the past. New building should bring tradition and heritage back to life.”27 In a retrospective account of the Stadium, he writes that its “series of water surfaces recalled the characteristic moats of Khmer settlement.”28 While true, this statement overlooks the equally obvious fact that the water surfaces recall not only moats—in Angkorian times reserved for temples—but also the ponds which can be found next to many ordinary rural Cambodian homes, and in most farms. That the Stadium’s use of water recalls domestic spaces such as these is significant as it functions in tandem with the numerous references to stilted wooden houses, which we will turn to soon.

• 29 Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Leon Collins, Building Cambodia, op. cit. (note 6), p. 204–205.
• 30 Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation 1860–1945, Hawai’i and Chiang Mai, HI: Univer (...)

17Molyvann’s rejection of “Western ideas that destroy all traces of the past” may be understood, in part, as a rejection of the beaux-arts style of architecture popularized during French colonial rule (in Cambodia as elsewhere, within and beyond Southeast Asia); that is, Molyvann’s design preferences may be understood to have been at least partly political in nature. This may seem paradoxical, given that the architect was vocally proud of his French education, and often affirmed his respect for Le Corbusier’s designs and ideas, as well as those of other French (and French-trained) architects and engineers. Yet Molyvann’s embrace of the brutalist idiom, despite his rejection of beaux-arts French architecture, may be explained by his sense that many of the ideas promulgated by Le Corbusier were resonant with vernacular Asian building forms. The elevation of buildings on columns, of course, echoes stilted housing found throughout Southeast Asia. But the modular proportioning of many so-called “International Style” buildings was also likened by Molyvann to Japanese architecture and its basis in the dimensions of the tatami.29 Moreover, the adoption of elements of French brutalism may be understood as a conscious choice, an act of volition on the part of Molyvann and other postcolonial Cambodian architects. By contrast, the spread of beaux-arts structures in bricks and concrete during the colonial period had been not a choice but rather an imposition insisted on by French authorities, who initially met with considerable resistance from their Cambodian counterparts. According to historian Penny Edwards, “it had taken three years of persuasion, wrote one French entrepreneur, before the king ‘finally decided to build the town in brick,’” which would in turn bring numerous lucrative construction contracts for the French.30 The Stadium’s rejection of architectural forms associated with French colonial rule may be understood as an assertion of national independence, one decade into the postcolonial era, just as it was also an articulation of Cold War nonalignment.

• 31 Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Leon Collins, Building Cambodia, op. cit. (note 6), p. 212.
• 32 Roger Nelson, “Pathways in Performance,” op. cit. (note 13).

18Another key way in which the Sangkum’s neutralist policy has been reflected in the National Stadium is in the diverse ways in which the space has been used, political as well as sporting. Although the 1963 Southeast Asian Games which initially prompted its construction were canceled and the 1963 World Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) were relocated to Jakarta,31 the Stadium hosted speeches and rallies featuring leaders from across the spectrum of politics, from Charles de Gaulle in 1966 (fig. 5) to Pol Pot a decade later (fig. 6). In 1993, during nationwide elections held under the supervision of the occupying United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, the Stadium was one of the capital’s main polling stations; in the 2010s, it is used annually as the site for official commemorations of the Vietnamese invasion/liberation in 1979, a key moment in Prime Minister Hun Sen’s narrative of political legitimacy and control. Just as regular performances by Sihanouk’s Royal Ballet for politicians and diplomats throughout the Sangkum period proved remarkably flexible in their ability to shift political allegiances,32 so, too, the dramatic spaces of the Stadium have proven equally amenable to political figures and uses from across the spectrum.

• 33 Norodom Sihanouk, La femme cambodgienne à l’heure du Sangkum [Women during Sangkum Reastr Niyum], (...)

19Sihanouk and his fellow Sangkum leaders repeatedly asserted the important role of women in the nation’s achievements. In Sihanouk’s short films celebrating the Sangkum’s achievements, modernist buildings are consistently used as backdrops. In one film titled Women During Sangkum Reastr Niyum, an all-female team plays basketball alongside the National Stadium (fig. 7), dozens of women cycle past modern concrete apartments and public buildings, and a fleet of women sail along the Tonle Sap River, close to the Chaktomuk Conference Hall.33 In functioning as symbols of the Sangkum’s technologically advanced modernization program and political neutralism, these modern buildings are also positioned as symbolic articulations of the central place of women in this national project. All designed by men, modern Cambodian buildings are presented in films such as this—and also in numerous publications produced under Sihanouk’s supervision—as equally accessible to and utilized by the modern Cambodian women of the Sangkum period.

• 34 Fabienne Luco, “House-Building Rituals and Ceremonies in a Village of the Angkor Complex,” in Fran (...)
• 35 Jacques Népote, “Understanding the Cambodian Dwelling: Space and Gender in Traditional Homes,” in (...)

20While post-independence modernizations saw women playing an increasingly prominent (albeit still far from equal) role in the public sphere—in the kind of political, sporting, and other activities that may have taken place at the Stadium, for example—in conventional Cambodian understandings, women are said to dominate the domestic realm. It is widely held that women control the finances in most households, for example. There are also various ritual roles that only women can play in the ceremonies that accompany the construction of a new stilted wooden house in a rural Cambodian village,34 as well as sections of the stilted house which are typically reserved for use by female occupants.35

• 36 See Roger Nelson, “‘The Work the Nation Depends On’: Landscapes and Women in the Paintings of Nhek (...)
• 37 Author unnamed, “Une visite à la galerie Sam Yoeun,” [A visit to the Sam Yoeun Gallery], Réalités (...)
• 38 I deal with this in a chapter in my doctoral thesis, which I am developing for a future publicatio (...)

25My interest is rather in how the Stadium’s structure might be and might have been perceived and experienced by Cambodians, especially at the time of its construction. In the absence of records documenting people’s responses to the Stadium at the time of its construction, such a line of inquiry is necessarily somewhat speculative, but it is informed by a multidisciplinary understanding of the visual and cultural context of that time. Firstly, then as now, the vast majority of the population are rural farmers, and very many of these live in stilted wooden houses. Secondly, the prevalence of images of stilted wooden houses in the representational paintings of rural landscapes by Cambodian artists of the 1960s—and their ubiquity as décor in modern concrete buildings, including those designed by Molyvann—demonstrates that stilted wooden houses were prominent as images, even in architecturally modern urban settings in Phnom Penh.36 Thirdly, one of the city’s prominent galleries displaying such paintings was located directly opposite the Stadium. One review of this gallery, published in 1968, specifically noted that its glass display windows, which were filled with paintings depicting bucolic scenes, also reflected the Stadium’s “audacious” architecture.37 And fourthly, many Khmer language novels of the period include detailed descriptions of stilted houses.38

• 39 Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Leon Collins, Building Cambodia, op. cit. (note 6), p. 97. See also Ra (...)

27Yet repeated vertical lines, an echo or resonance of vernacular stilted housing if not a deliberate or conscious reference to the form, are found not only in the National Stadium but also in most modern buildings from the post-independence era. Other well-known examples include the small, circular library designed by Vann Molyvann as part of his Teacher’s Training College in Phnom Penh (completed 1971, fig. 11), and also the Technical Training Institute (completed 1969, fig. 12), designed by another architect from the period, Mam Sophana (born 1936), who studied architecture at Miami University from 1958.39 The use of water catchments—decorative as well as functional for draining and cooling—is also found not only at the Stadium but in many other public works from this period, including both of these aforementioned structures. While Molyvann referred to such reservoirs as being designed in reference to Angkorian moats, as mentioned earlier, they also recall ponds used for domestic use, found alongside stilted houses in most rural villages.

• 40 This phenomenon is also explored in: Sakona Loeung, “Exploring Modern Private Houses and Ways of L (...)

29Indeed, private homes from the period still found throughout Phnom Penh suggest a trend of adapting quite specific design elements from large public projects for the domestic environment.40 One rather baroque modern house in the Tonle Bassac neighborhood boasts hexagonal windows which are precise miniatures of those featured in the classrooms of Molyvann’s Teacher’s Training College (fig. 13). Moreover, the oblique vertical plane of the house’s cutaway roof—visible to the left of and above the hexagonal windows—is clad in terracotta-colored bricks divided into evenly sized sections, also in a rythm with the similarly obliquely angled external walls of Molyvann’s classroom buildings.

• 41 See Eleanor Mannikka, Angkor Wat: Time, Space, and Kingship, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i P (...)

33I call this quality “unmonumental.” This is not to deny the Stadium’s numerous explicit references to the monuments and temples of Angkor. Yet it is also worth recognizing that while most Angkorian temples are legible from a certain distance as a unified whole, the experience of being within their walls is also not a feeling of being subsumed into an architectural immensity, but rather of moving through a series of smaller areas, such as causeways, galleries, shrines, gardens, and so on.41 This is analogous to what I argue is the experience of moving through the National Stadium, despite its very large overall plan.

• 42 This phrase is from a Cambodian student in her late teens, who (like tens of thousands of her peer (...)

34Let me offer some examples of the spatial experience of being inside the Stadium’s various zones, in order to illustrate this sense of it being “a big place, but with many smaller places.”42 The clearest instance of this is in the indoor arena. Square in form and covered by a dramatic cruciform suspended concrete roof, this is one of the finest of many examples of Molyvann’s use of cross-ventilation to provide natural cooling. Under each of the approximately 8,000 seats is a small opening, through which air from outside (as well as some light) can pass (fig. 8). Of course, this opening functions to cool down the entire space. But whenever there is an even slight breeze (as there very often is at this elevation), each individual spectator can feel it against her or his own legs. Watching a sports match or performance, as spectators we may often tend to forget ourselves, to come to feel as if dissolved into a mass. Yet the individuated vents in the indoor stadium disrupt this viewing experience; we become bodily aware of our specific position. In short, our experience of the vast space of the indoor stadium is transformed into the experience of a much smaller space: that of our own seat.

• 43 Bill Greaves, unpublished presentation at Time, Space, Voice: Phnom Penh’s White Building, a bilin (...)

36There are many more examples of spaces in the Stadium that spatially divide the vastness of the whole complex into smaller components, thus making the experience one of being in a comparatively small space, rather than in an overbearing monument. The swimming pool seating, while physically adjoining the main outdoor stadium, faces away from it and is instead oriented to the city’s center, thus forming a surprisingly intimate area that can seat up to 8000 people. And perhaps most prominent of all in the twenty-first century context is the open concourse that runs the length of the outdoor stadium, interrupted only by dramatic cantilevered concrete shades. Every evening as the sun sets, thousands of people of all ages gather here, some to exercise in groups led by aerobics instructors and accompanied by recorded music, and others to eat nom kruok and other snacks. As architect Bill Greaves has argued, the astonishingly varied uses of this space—all self-organized by citizens, without official sponsorship or direction—are testament to the flexibility of Molyvann’s architecture, its openness to multiple uses, and its non-prescriptive character.43 This character works together with the internal division of spaces that I have outlined.

• 44 Pen Sereypagna presentation at Time, Space, Voice: Phnom Penh’s White Building symposium, 2015.

37Internal division of very large structures into smaller subsections is common in many of the major public projects of the Sangkum. The two largest housing developments of the period were co-located in the Bassac Riverfront Complex, a cultural precinct built on reclaimed land, which also included a theater, exhibition halls, a water sports complex, a performing arts conservatory, and landscaped gardens. These two housing developments—among the first multistory apartment buildings in Phnom Penh—are now known as the Grey Building (originally Olympic Village Apartments, designed by Vann Molyvann and completed c. 1963, now renovated beyond recognition; fig. 15) and the White Building (originally Bassac Municipal Apartments, completed 1963, still extant; fig. 16). Both were designed with features that break up their immense length—several hundred meters each—into smaller sections. In the White Building, the 468 initially planned apartments were spread over six separate buildings, each linked by an identical open air staircase which provides light, ventilation, and an informal gathering place for residents. Pen Sereypagna’s detailed study of the White Building’s architectural plans notes that each of the six individual substructures is of a more intimate scale than the Building as a whole, proposing that in scale each block is more approximate to a small rural village, where residents would typically know all of their neighbors.44 In the Grey Building, 164 apartments were stacked in an undulating “stepped” formation, which Molyvann claims was inspired by New York’s skyline, and which appears from some angles or at a distance like numerous buildings close together, rather than one structure.

• 45 The photograph is from the personal archive of Sanda Men Makoth, and contextual information is fro (...)

38To gain a glimpse of how the Grey Building was experienced by its occupants, we may look to an archival photograph from 1968 (fig. 17). In it, the French-born Louise-Marie Men Makoth née Jarrier (who was married to the prominent Cambodian artist Men Makoth), a resident at the time, poses in front of the Grey Building with her two young daughters. The photograph is shot from mid-distance, perhaps in order to show the figures at full length, in the context of the landscaped garden and the multistory building behind them. Significantly, however, a hand-drawn line of blue ink across the building indicates where the Men Makoth family’s apartment was located. This family memento suggests that these residents’ experience of the Grey Building was not of the immensity of the overall structure, but rather of the more intimately proportioned, domestically scaled section that housed their own apartment.45

• 46 Lee Kuan Yew, “Speech by the Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, at the State Dinner in his Honour Gi (...)
• 47 Reclaiming of land in Singapore began in 1965. See Joshua Comaroff, “Built on Sand: Singapore and (...)
• 48 The Housing Development Board (HDB), now synonymous with Singapore’s high-density, high-rise apart (...)
• 49 Singapore, National Archives of Singapore, Image 20120000379 – 0025, Negative A4083/14/32, Ministr (...)
• 50 Quoted in Helen Grant Ross and Darryl Leon Collins, Building Cambodia, op. cit. (note 6), p. 16.

41During an official visit to Phnom Penh in 1967, Singapore’s prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, in an official address at the state dinner given in his honor, enthused that “the new Phnom Penh [has] the architectural style, in steel and concrete, of what Angkor had in sandstone and laterite” and made special mention of an “exhibition building […] founded on newly reclaimed land.”46 This exhibition building was one of several within the Bassac Riverfront Complex, which residents of the adjacent Grey and White Buildings at that time recall being frequented by those from within the neighborhood, as well as by the wider community, and international visitors such as Prime Minister Lee. The reclaiming of land, as well as mass construction in steel and concrete, would come to be defining features of Singapore but were at the time of this visit only in their infancy.47 Yet Sihanouk’s earlier visit to Singapore in 1962 also coincided with the city-state’s initial stages of development of the high-rise apartment housing for which it would later be renowned.48 Photographic records of the visit show Sihanouk being shown plans for large-scale urban housing.49 This follows closely from the prince’s 1961 announcement that “our capital must deal with the problem urban population […] We must begin the construction of low-cost apartment buildings.”50