The New York Times Magazine
Sunday, May 15, 2005

The City He Built
By MATT STEINGLASS
(Matt Steinglass writes for the Boston Globe, the Nation and other
publications. He lives in Hanoi.)

It is hard to imagine a crueler fate for an urban planner than seeing his
country taken over by a regime with a murderous hatred of cities. As
Cambodia's pre-eminent architect and chief urban planner during the 1960's,
Vann Molyvann laid out significant portions of Phnom Penh and designed
dozens of landmark structures fusing High Modernist design with classical
Khmer elements, including the Corbusier-influenced Independence Monument,
the stacked-block minimalist Front du Bassac housing development and the
National Sports Complex. Then, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge marched into the
capital and evacuated its entire population. They used the stadium for
political meetings and mass rallies. In the southern port of Sihanoukville,
they tried to blow up Vann's National Bank of Cambodia building (having
abolished money) but gave up when the vaults proved too strong.

''They took Cambodia from a country in the process of development to a
communal society without the slightest vestige of the modern or the
urban,'' says Vann, who is now 79.

Today, having weathered invasion by Vietnam, decades of civil war and a
U.N.-run transition period, Cambodia has settled into a relatively stable,
corrupt quasi-democracy, dominated by the ex-communist Cambodian People's
Party. Foreign aid has fueled a measure of economic growth. And Vann's
legacy now faces a new menace: development. Indeed, ill-conceived
development may do more harm to his structures than the Khmer Rouge ever
did. ''The buildings survived being abandoned better than they've survived
being misused,'' says Helen Grant Ross, a Phnom Penh-based architect and an
advocate for the preservation of Vann's work.

In the most egregious case, the government awarded a contract for the
renovation of Vann's stadium complex to a Taiwan-based real-estate firm
that threw up a clump of charmless low-rise retail and office buildings on
its grounds. These filled in the network of pools that Vann had designed,
like the moats around the ancient temples of Angkor Wat, to absorb
monsoon-season rains.

''Now the streets next to the stadium are constantly flooding,'' Vann says
ruefully. Meanwhile, part of the Front du Bassac housing complex has
deteriorated into a slum, while the rest was transformed by a recent
renovation into a dull, suburban-looking box. Next door, the 1968 Preah
Suramarit Theater, an elegant brick-and-concrete wedge with angular
staircases cantilevered over an interior reflecting pool, was gutted by
fire in 1994. In February, the telecom magnate Kith Meng reportedly agreed
to reconstruct the theater in exchange for construction rights on the
surrounding land, but some fear a repeat of the sports-stadium fiasco.

Asked how he feels about the plight of his buildings, Vann responds with a
20-minute soliloquy. (Among the first Cambodians to graduate from college,
Vann attended Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and Ecole du Louvre
in Paris, and retains the French intellectual's verbal athleticism.) He
depicts his buildings' travails as part of a more general urban crisis: a
''guerre fonciere,'' or ''real-estate war,'' with roots in the 1979
takeover of the country by the Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies.
''They consider the property that they acquired after their entry into
Cambodia as war booty,'' Vann explains.

One of the seized houses was Vann's own, an airy multilevel villa that he
designed and built in 1969 -- just a year before a U.S.-backed coup
escalated Cambodia's civil war. Vann fled the country in 1971 and soon
after settled with his wife and children in his wife's native Switzerland.
He spent much of the next two decades working on the development of
third-world housing for the U.N. When he returned to Cambodia in 1991, he
found his villa serving, of all things, as the office of the national
land-registration administration. ''It was completely neglected,'' he says,
''in a shocking state.'' He applied to the government to have his house
returned. Amazingly, it was.

Vann spent the 90's as head of Apsara, an independent government authority
created to safeguard the temples of Angkor Wat. By authoring a zoning plan
that kept big hotels outside the borders of the ancient temple complexes,
he was instrumental in preserving the area's authenticity and nurturing its
tourism industry. Eventually the C.P.P. pushed him out of Apsara: he was
deemed insufficiently friendly to development.

Not all of Vann's buildings are threatened. His fan-shaped Chaktomuk
Conference Hall and his State Palace building are mainstays of Phnom Penh's
public architecture. The low-cost private houses he built in the west of
the city are very much lived-in. In Sihanoukville, the showcase factory he
designed for the SKD brewery is still churning out bottles, and the
National Bank of Cambodia building is once again taking deposits. The
Institute of Foreign Languages in Phnom Penh is in full use, though
construction nearby will partly hide his original design from the street.

Vann is concerned less about the fate of his buildings than about the
neglect of Phnom Penh's infrastructure. The city has a precarious
relationship with water: each summer, the combination of monsoon rains and
melting snow flowing down the Mekong from the Himalayas floods the farmland
surrounding the city and causes the Tonle Sap River to reverse direction.
The government has failed to build dikes to keep up with the city's
expansion, while shortsighted development is filling in the lakes and
canals designed to channel floodwaters. A particularly heavy flood year,
Vann fears, could prove disastrous.

It is one of the standard critiques of the Modernists of Vann's generation
that their grandiose designs crushed the street-level urban fabric and
ignored environmental sustainability. Vann's case stands this critique on
its head. His 1960's vision for Phnom Penh epitomizes the grandiose
optimism of ''la Ville Radieuse,'' the French version of midcentury utopian
urbanism. Yet it was Vann's city plan that paid exquisite attention to
Phnom Penh's environmental concerns and urban fabric, while the
privatization and decentralization of the last 15 years threaten to scar
the city's landmarks and wreak havoc with its water management.

One of Vann's admirers told me that it would serve the government right if
there was a major flood. When I clumsily repeated the wisecrack to Vann, he
didn't find it funny.

''Three hundred thousand people would lose their homes,'' he said soberly.
''You can't imagine what could happen here.''[End]