New Khmer Architecture

Capitol Cinema, 1964, Vann Molyvann

I'm just back from a research trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia which, following independence from France in 1953, became the capital of the newly independent nation as well as Cambodian modernism's proving ground. Cambodians, like the Vietnamese, needed to negotiate both a colonial past and the challenges of post-colonial independence: architecturally, these challenges were addressed by "New Khmer Architecture" and its most famous architect, Vann Molyvann.

Vann Molyvann's Chaktomuk Conference Hall

Born in 1926, Vann Molyvann was the citizen of a colonized Cambodia. However problematic the colonial regime may have been (and it certainly was), his colonial status allowed Vann Molyvann entrance into both the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole du Louvre in Paris (he was originally admitted to law school, but found himself ill-suited and applied to art school instead). In Paris he studied under Le Corbusier. Vann Molyvann's work is often read in terms of Le Corbusier's dogmatic program of high modernist architecture and urbanism.



After returning to Cambodia in 1955, Molyvann was "Cambodia's first qualified post-independence architect" (this comes from a source I have reservations about, but it's certainly not a great stretch of the imagination: there were only a handful of scholarships for Cambodians to pursue higher education in the metropole. This is something to keep in mind about the reality of colonialism's "educating and civilizing" function, particularly as a context for Molyvann's extraordinary education.) Molyvann was then hired by the Ministry of Public Works and, indirectly, King Sihanouk. The period of Sihanouk's rule is frequently figured as a golden age in Cambodian history: a heady period of reformation, urbanization, and a pervasive spirit of progressivism. There was a tremendous need for an architecture to express this new reality, to embody both modern progress and indigeneity which, in the absence of the colonizer, enjoyed a newly privileged position.

A stylized Naga, or serpect demon

A Naga from Angkor

What was required was a native son conversant in both the vernacular and the language of high Modernism. This was a language embedded in a 20th Century mythology of rationalism, progressivism, post-nationalism and urban utopianism. Vann Molyvann, that native son trained in the new urbanism, was the perfect architect for his age. In the relatively short period of time between his return from Paris and his flight from Cambodia after Sihanouk was ousted in the 1970 military coup, Vann Molyvann saw the construction of numerous large-scale projects: from his Independence Monument and Olympic Stadium, to his Institute of Foreign Languages and Front Du Bassac housing project. He has left a vast body of work in Cambodia and in Phnom Penh in particular.



Before moving on, I'd like to make one observation: when Vann Molyvann returned to Cambodia, the city of Phnom Penh was going through a period of radical urbanization (in line with a similar "modernization projects" in other third world countries). The carte-blanche which this kind of modernization requires (and the creative destruction it entails) allowed him the rare opportunity to see countless projects realized. We have seen this centralization of power, this commitment to unchecked modernization embodied in Robert Moses, Baron Haussman, Peter the Great among other modernizers. The carte-blanche they enjoyed was intimately related, perhaps even identical, to the carte-blanche all colonizers gave themselves in the colony.

I would argue that if you want to see unchecked modernization through urbanization, the real place to look is the colonies, where the colony qua "champs d'experience" (or experimental field) allowed modernism its greatest urban test grounds. From this I draw a conclusion: there is a real historical relationship between the colony as experimental grounds and the metropole as the ultimate destination for those experiments. This means that the colony allowed the metropole to learn how to colonize/modernize itself. This disturbs the definition of both "colony" and "metropole" as well as their respective ethical values and their relationships to the very idea of "modernity." It also suggests that colonialism served a fundamental part in creating modernity as a cultural, economic, and aesthetic reality.

Part of the National Sports Complex or Olympic Stadium, 1964

Exterion Stairs


If we understand the "colony" as a suite of power relations which may remain intact in the "post-colony" then perhaps we should watch with greater suspicion whenever we see that volatile mixture of the will-to-monumentalize and centralization of power. This is to say that Vann Molyvann's lineage must include the colonial architects (the colonizer/modernizers) who preceded him.

That said, Vann Molyvann's work is beautiful and responded to real needs with genuine artistry. Like all masterpieces, the work contains within it a tension which both affirms itself and engages its viewer in a dialogue about the problems it must face and create.

I'd like to look at a university Vann Molyvann designed as well as a few statements he's made to better understand the interrelationships of these ideas.


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The circular structure in the Library, note the courtyard

The Institute of Foreign Languages was designed by Vann Molyvann in the late 1960's. The institute consists of three main sections: the round and faceted library, a large central building containing classrooms, and another set of classrooms built on concrete pilotis (or stilts). As you can see from the satellite photo above, the central building block is accessed via a ramp, which rises from street level to the raised concourse, which gives access to both the main education block, and, to the west, the second education block. Pools (dry in the aerial photo) lie on both sides of the ramp as well as around the library, which is accessed by a flight of stairs which rises above the moat.

The library in its moat

The institute is classically modernist in many ways: from its building materials (concrete, steel, glass), to its geometric form and rationalistic organization of space. The main ramp and the raised concourse suggest a distinctively modernist interest in the orderly circulation of bodies through space. The ramp however does not evoke only the highway (to which it is connected) although this connection is doubtlessly intentional: Vann Molyvann also creates life underneath the ramp, framing views of the library and creating a shaded and cool walkway which conveys pedestrians to the education block shielded from both tropical sun and rain.

The eastern wall of the main building block marks a limit of the space, note how a "brick wall" here is used to mark the boundary.

The floating brick wall appears again on the western wall of the second block, closing and bracketing the space.

Vann Molyvann is not however transplanting an alien style here, but developing a hybrid better suited to local conditions and able to reflect its national character. Throughout the site there is a notable effort to control the level of light, maximize the circulation of air, and offer shelter from tropical storms. As I've noted before, one of the key features of traditional Vietnamese architecture is the integration of environmental elements into the design: trees and bodies of water are used in ingenious ways to lower the temperature of the site and allow for drainage. This kind of "passive" design controls climate without consuming any energy. We see the same design principles at work in the institute.

The courtyard-facing side of the second block. An enormous banyan tree grows in the center of the courtyard.

A key feature of Vann Molyvann's design is the use of vernacular style. The institute refers again and again to the Angkorian kingdom, and its finest monument: Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is also entered through a ramp, and to reinforce the connection, Vann Molyvann even includes two sets of stylized Nagas, the serpent demons whose heads guard the Angkorian temple entrances and whose bodies mark and protect their perimeters. The symmetrical placement of the pools on opposite sides of the ramp also appears at Angkor.

Library interior

I'd like to think now about monumentality as an organizing principle: the institute clearly possesses a monumental character--from its function as an educational and cultural center, to its large scale and dialogical connection to Angkor Wat (the monument par excellence). It is a space imbued with meaning. The institute even meets the Eliadean criterion of the center in that it is meant to connect the viewer to his mythical origins and provide both temporal and spatial orientation.

Angkor Wat

I'm a little wary of this however as one of the marks of the French Empire was its monumental fixation. Susan Bayly has written an excellent essay on the subject of this monumental preoccupation called "French Anthropology and the Durkheimians in Colonial Indochina." She notes that French colonists identified themselves with the Champa, a kingdom centered near present day central Vietnam which famously built towers similar to those at Angkor (the Champa incidentally were frequently at odds with the Angkorian kingdom and sacked Angkor Wat in the 12th century). In a Durkheimian scheme, monumentality is a mark of advanced sociality and offers therefore an "objective" metric for a society's level of "development." (Bayly also notes that the French identified not only with the Champa's monumentality but their present state of decay.) In preserving this monumental fixation in the period of national independence, I worry that Vann Molyvann inadvertently reinforced this monumental fixation. The insistence on Angkor Wat as a rebuttal to French monumentality is confined safely within the bounds of a traditional monumental discourse.

In other ways however, the institute also shows a notably anti-monumental character. The form of the library is said to be borrowed from the shape of a traditional hat. The traditional stilt house is reflected in the use of pilotis throughout the site. And overall, the atmosphere I think the institute creates is not one of monumental domination but rather balanced co-existence. By monumentalizing traditional and traditionally impermanent forms (the hat, the stilt house) and in working modestly (for a modernist project), Vann Molyvann engages the monumental question and the imperial legacy in a non-dialectical way.

Does the meaning of a high modernist form change when it is circumscribed by the mythical Nagas? When a trajectory is drawn from the Angkorian kingdom to the new capital by way of Paris, where and when are the capital's origins? Is it possible to build monuments which have the potential to question the assertions they make?

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Meeting center, Bach Mai, Hanoi

As the revolutionary years past and Vietnam moved into the last quarter of the 20th century, Vietnamese architecture moved away from the rectilinear forms of high modernism (think Soviet era pre-fabrication) to more varied post-modern and post-colonial forms. I don't mean to suggest that these "post-isms" correspond to radical social reorganizations or even totally distinct aesthetic movements. As I've noted in the past, we should be conscious of the ways that a fixation on changing surfaces can ignore structural stability, and ethical stagnation within a society.


University of Cultural Studies, Hanoi. Note how the cement pillars evoke a stilt house. The "traditional" roof shape over the stairs is reflected as a motif in the shape of the windows over the central section.

If we think of TDH Bach Khoa as a kind of modernist "end of architecture" approaching the unity of form and function, then the question of what-comes-next is interesting. I think it's clear that TDH Bach Khoa is not in fact anything like an "end of architecture" and that it has its particularities, local accommodations, even ornamentation, but in terms of understanding what follows its helpful of thinking of TDH Bach Khoa as a figure of high modernism: an experiment in creating rational architecture for a new Man, that mythic figure who has arrived at post-nationalism, stripped of the totems and illusions of his past mythologies and prepared to enter the last chapter of History.

Water elements (dry here in winter) and plantings are places among the stilts, creating a pastoral effect below the modern building.

Recreations of the Dong Son bronzes are affixed to a gate at the Bach Mai meeting house.

What happened however, as the revolution receded, was the emergence of a new architecture which re-populated the spaces emptied by high modernism. This new architecture sought to create a new architectural language which incorporated phantasmatic images and signs of an authentic (pre-colonial) past. The stilt house, the dinh (meeting house), and the chua (temple)
were appropriated as precisely these figures of tradition and authenticity. Though these had, in the revolutionary period, been understood as "feudal" in purely Marxist terms, they were now re-appraised. The Dong Son bronzes (dating from ~600 BC - ~300 AD) also became important symbols of this "authentic" past. Ironically, may of the bronzes of were discovered by colonial archaeologists in the 20th century.

People's Committee building Ha Noi, note the "stilts" as well the bamboo inspired bris-soleil (a la Ngo Viet Thu)

In actuality it's misleading to think of these forms as being important only after the aesthetic de-population of 1960's high modernism. The bronzes were an important symbol in nationalist discourses before independence from France. Ho Chi Minh famously associated his image with the stilt house behind the colonial governor's mansion rather than with the mansion itself and the message was clear: Western forms were colonial, decadent, and alien while "traditional" forms were authentic, anti-bourgeois, and national. In fact, the ways that "the indigenous" and "the modern" have been variously oppposed and hybridized throughout the 20th century are varied and complex.

A strange mix of styles.

The references at work here to stilt houses, bamboo, and the dong son bronzes represent yet another chapter in this interrelationship. Much of this Soviet and post-Soviet architecture is not particularly valued or loved, but I think it really merits some appreciation considering its strange commitment to these two fraught principles

Ngo Viet Thu

Medical University, HCM City

Ngo Viet Thu was the architect of the Presidential Palace as well as the Pedagogical University in Hue, about which I posted in July. He was born in 1926 near Hue where, in addition to the Pedagogical University, he designed a church which you can see below. For a timeline of his life and works check out: http://www.geocities.com/namsonngoviet/NgoVietThu.html

Ngo Viet Thu was born and raised in Vietnam and studied at Truong Cao Dang in Da Lat and then the Academie des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1955 he won the prestigious Rome Competition (the Academie's highest architectural prize) and in 1962 became the first Asian architect to be made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. His close association with the Southern regime led to a year-long term in a "re-education" camp. In his later years, the political climate seemed to have changed enough that he was able to return to work. In his final years he regained his good public standing and was involved in a number of important and highly visible design projects.

Central Market, Da Lat, a collaborative project

Church, Hue

Pedagogical University, Hue

Ngo Viet Thu (1926-2000)

Right now, I'm trying to figure out what his involvement was with the agrovilles program, which was a massive forced relocation project in South Vietnam in the 1960's (which later evolved into the strategic hamlet program). The agrovilles were ostensibly modernization projects: they would concentrate populations to aid economic development and increase access to public services. These concentrated populations would be situated along major highways, increasing their connection to political and economic centers. In actuality they resembled massive prisons, with gates and guards present to "protect them" from the influence of the Viet Cong. They were also built with corvee labor, then once the families were re-located and forced to re-construct their homes, they were forced to pay the government for their new land (which incidentally was expropriated by the government).

Reunification Palace, HCM City/ Presidential Palace, Saigon

I've been wrestling with finding the best ways to write about the Reunification Palace for a few days now and I haven't come to any great answers. I think it's going to be the subject of a paper or chapter, for the time being then, I'll offer some basic information and limit my analysis to "the French connection."

Norodom Palace

The Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City was, before 1975, the Presidential Palace in Saigon. Construction of the palace began in 1962, almost exactly 100 years after construction began on Norodom Palace, the office and residence of the French Governors General of Indochina which previously occupied the site. The irreparable damage done to Norodom Palace by American bombers in 1962 led to its demolition and the erection of the new palace. (The palace was inaugurated in 1967, meaning that it's design and completion occurred at almost exactly the same time as Truong Dai Hoc Bach Khoa in Hanoi.)

Reunification Palace

I think these two aerial views can help to illustrate some important aspects of the legacy of French colonialism. First, note the similarity in basic form, the same insistence on the use of monumental axes as means of expressing state power. A New York Times article suggested that the design was based on a traditional Vietnamese character (Vietnamese was once written with the Nom script, which uses Sinitic characters). I tend to think the architect, Ngo Viet Thu, used the design of the original structure as a template. Consider too that both Ngo Viet Thu and Hermite, the architect of the original palace, were both products of the same classical Beaux-Arts education. This raises an essential question of the post colony: to what extent are the regimes of the post-colony doomed to replicate the structure, institutions, and policies of the colonial authorities which precede them? If the colony is in fact a suite of power relations does the national identity of the individuals who occupy particular positions really alter anything?


Central Atrium

It would be possible to see the Reunification Palace as evidence of continuity with the (colonial) past. The fact of Ngo Viet Thu's Beaux-Arts education and his use of the largely (Western) International Style suggest precisely this continuity. If we look a little more closely though, it's possible to both suggest that something new is being made here; borne of both a colonial past and a sense of continuity with a pre-colonial past, an authentic Vietnamese-ness.

(This is my account of how a new mythology in the post colonial period is made; I talk about the pre-colonial past, authentic Vietnameseness, memory, etc. as a local symbol set here and am avoiding analysis so far. Here too theory and history seem very different: is International Modernism really North Atlantic early 20th Century style? Is it the style of Late Capitalism in a few Western metropolises? Or all this and more . . .)

Many have written that it is precisely this obsessive searching for an authentic (and, the thinking goes, pre-colonial) past which characterizes the post-colony. Anti-colonialism may serve as an effective unifying political force during the last days of the colonial period, but in the post colonial period there is turn to autocthony, memory, and a blood-based identity in the post-colony to re-inscribe nationhood. This keep the reigns of power in the post-colonial authority's hands, extinguishes the revolutionary flames (to mix metaphors), and importantly attempts to create a meaningful home for the nation. The memory of this invented past also seems to require a new and reductive sense of both the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Visually, we could read the use of traditional crafts and motifs in the palace as precisely this kind of search for authenticity.

What we see everywhere in the Palace however is the endless and conscientious mixing or hybridization of both modernist and traditional elements. I would like to suggest that this offers a pervasive and inclusive visual style which disrupts modernism as a purely occidental trope, and the widely held idea of the post-colony as doomed to both mimicry or a fetishized past. What Ngo Viet Thu attempted to do, and I think did successfully is invent a Vietnamese Modernist style, a disruptive hybrid which expanded the possible meanings of each of its constituent parts.
The facade consists of a stylized row of concrete bamboo which functions as a bris-soleil


The use of traditional Vietnamese imperial design elements evoke a dual history of monumentalities: remember that monumental axes have longer roots in Vietnam than their use by the Colonial authority.

Traditional Vietnamese Art is generally considered to include woodblock print making, silk painting, and most famously, lacquerware. Here lacquer has been used to decorate chairs as well as to panel the walls of the room.

Lacquer panels

Stylized traditional motifs (here, a sun and dragons, an imperial symbol)

The use of traditional signs embedded in an international modernist matrix anticipates post-modernism: signs and particularities re-inscribe themselves here freely and in new constellations. This is not the kind of post-modernism which self-referentially empties the signs of their meanings but one which instead tries to weave a cohesive whole from the visual fragments of past, present, and future. If high modernist aesthetics can be said to move in the direction of a pure form, of movement away from the illusion, distraction, and particularity of previous aesthetics, post-modernism can be seen as an experimental field in which artists follow this "end of art" with a re-population of signs. Here, the requirement of a kind simultaneity of opposites ("the indigenous" and "the modern") has given rise to an early post-modernism: in fact, it is precisely this kind of coincidence of opposites which will be said to characterize post-modernism.

That said, this pre-cursor of post modernism may be said to be guilty of precisely the same crimes that contemporary post modernism is guilty of: a blind fascination with surfaces that has somehow forgotten the political and economic structures which surround it. The Presidential Palace was designed for a corrupt tyrant and it was absolutely meant to convey both his entrenched power and his continuity with a long line of autocrats, both indigenous and alien.

Though the North certainly had its own problems (don't get me started) it's easy to imagine the Presidential Palace as a kind of capitalist folly, an opulent and decadent monument to a past of gross economic inequality. Let's not fall too easily into bad pseudo-Marxist aesthetic criticism though: the Presidential Palace or Reunification Palace is a masterpiece of design, both modernist and Vietnamese.

Eastern Campus, TDH Bach Khoa Ha Noi

As promised, a tour of the Eastern campus of Truong Dai Hoc Bach Khoa Ha Noi, or the Hanoi Polytechnic University, or the Hanoi University of Technology. The eastern campus was originally separated from the western campus by the Set River, which as I noted last time was filled in about two years ago. The eastern campus consists primarily of student dormitories. It's also the location of the university's sport stadium and olympic-sized swimming pool. There are also two buildings of the French colonial authority's Cite Universitaire in the eastern campus. Below is one of them:

In official colonial literature of the 1930's and 40's there is a near obsession with the Cite Universitaire. Describing the "blossoming" of the city in the 1940's, the then mayor-resident of Hanoi wrote, "the first important act in the realisation of our grand plan has been the erection of a cite universitaire . . . In little time, Hanoi will beproud to possess a cite universitaire comparable in all aspects to the great cities of Europe." Ultimately however his vision would be completed by Soviet specialists some twenty years later.

A newly renovated colonial-era building

Standard student housing ~1965


Neighborhood map

Writ small in the eastern campus is a whole history of the city in the last century: from colonial era buildings, to massive Soviet construction, to tiger-cage style private homes, to the in-fill of new homes in the contemporary period. The value placed on the institution of the university has allowed these layers to remain intact, though the significance of each has changed with each historical accretion.

New housing abuts Soviet-era dormitories.
Elements of Art Deco, International Modernism, and Socialist Constructivism mix in the student housing which was however constructed in the Soviet period ~1965.

What's fascinating about the historical shifts embodied in changing building styles is sometimes not the difference evident, but the continuity. The last wave of French building in the 1930's brought with it Art Deco and International Modernism. These new modernist aesthetics already contained within them elements of internationalism that dovetailed with Socialist post-nationalism. Colonialism created a historical condition for vast modern experiments; in retrospect, these experiments don't appear as different as they once may have.

Western modernisms used the colonies as experimental spaces. Many have noted that French urbanisme could not be practiced in France and required "experimental fields" in which to work: the co-emergence of urbanisme as a science and colonialism as a social, historical, and economic condition is not coincidental.

What then to make of built legacy of successive colonizers? In the revolutionary period there, there was certainly talk of the necessity of destroying the legacy of both the feudalists and colonists. The revolutionary project required the demolition of the past in order to create a new future. What we see in Bach Khoa in this period is a search for purely socialist architecture (essentially, architecture of the future, "naked technology"). There is a movement from colony to post-national society without any of the intermediary historical stages. This was a revolution in building along with all other aspects of society. Again however, there's a kind of restrospective continuity.

Decorative grillwork

Consider then the complicated place these new modernist movements have in Vietnam. I'm primarily interested in the ways of colonialism, socialism, and nationalism (however incompatible as mythologies) have in fact been hybridized in historical and architectural fields. There are lots of strange, seemingly out-of-place decorative elements in TDH Bach Khoa like the grillwork above. There are also the absolutely necessary adaptation which have to be made in a tropical climate. Orthodox modernist forms are given verandas and bris-soleils to allow to make more hospitable learning environments. All of these variations are moving towards what I see as a greater hybridity.

View from the veranda

In terms of "hybrid architecture" TDH Bach Khoa is really not the greatest example. There is a kind of relentless futurism in its design which precludes too much "historical" reference. There is also an absence of any "indigenous" reference, suggesting that in Soviet thinking, just as in the French thought which preceded it, modernism and indigeneity were opposed. Of course, the extent to which Constructivist architecture is really "Russian" depends on one's reading of history (particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union), on whether or not "post-nationalism" and "pure technology" are possible, or if they are small aberrants in otherwise national narratives. Or perhaps post-nationalism and pure technology are the realities and nationalism is the comforting story we tell ourselves in an increasingly globalized world. What is at issue here is what the legacy of modernism is and ought to be. What TDHBK really demonstrates may be the story of modernity in Vietnam itself: a system of relations which undergo constant upheaval in the wholesale transformation of culture, economy, and society. TDHBK seems to suggest that this dialectic of modern centripetal and centrifugal forces may be subject to dynamics deeper than national affiliation.

New construction underway as the University expands

Whatever its legacy is however, TDH Bach Khoa set the building pattern on which virtually all of Vietnam's later universities are based. In addition, the university demonstrated the new technology of pre-fabricating concrete blocks. This technology would be employed all over Vietnam in the Soviet period. The innovations with concrete as well as the experimentation in passive design (as a means of efficient climate control) has led some to consider the tropical constructivism of the university to be the great architectural legacy of Vietnam. In future posts, I'll demonstrate some of the mutations these forms take in other, later universities.

In the past few years, some building have been demolished to make room for new construction.

The Stadium, with weird Olympic motif.





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