Some more had been bought by wealthy people and are undergoing restoration. Some others instead, have been occupied by poor families, buffaloes eating the wet grass, clothes hanged outside glassless windows, children playing with handmade toys. Tropical ivy crawling the twisting staircases, awkward graffiti decorating the walls, greenish for mosses and lichens, ageless unfading rubbish scattered on the floor of wacky balconies. Some other villas are hidden in the bushes and require a bit of exploration to be seen, those are the worthiest. Nowadays some are unmissable, still lining the boulevard where Catherine Deneuve drove her Cadillac during les années d’or. Few of these villas were taken over by Khmer Rouge cadres, setting up their headquarters, but most lay abandoned, for years that became decades, and still, they are. Like everywhere in Cambodia, people were forced out of their houses and driven to labor camps in the countryside. The Khmer Rouge yearsĭuring the Khmer Roug e years, havoc fell upon Kep, a symbol of everything the Cambodian communists were fighting against wealth, literacy, western influence, leisure. Molyvann is undoubtedly the leading figure of New Khmer Architecture, having worked on more than 100 projects from 1953 to 1970 when he managed to escape after the Lon Nol coup and so lived through the Khmer Rouge era. The protagonist of this era was Vann Molyvann, a Cambodian architect from Kampot who studied in France, few years before many of the Khmer Rouge leaders ironically did the same. So many critics may be moved towards Sihanouk, and he certainly made many mistakes, acting naive and being egocentric.īut nevertheless, he was in some way an enlightened king, with a genuine passion for arts and creativity, and in his own mistaken way, he always aimed for the better good of the nation, giving great spaces and resources to artists and creative people. (as Amazon Associates we earn commission from qualifying purchases) What’s left of the New Khmer Architecture This comes at no additional cost for you and helps us keep this website up and running. Sihanouk and Molyvannĭisclosure: Some of our articles contain affiliate links. Stilted houses with impossible stairs, wide windows with bizarre geometries, wide porches, and terraces. New Khmer Architecture, that was the name of the experiment, a melting-pot of western modernist ideas from Bauhaus, Richard Neutra and Le Corbusier and traditional Khmer architecture. Here King Sihanouk let loose his fantasy of a great Khmer nation, guiding light for a cultural renaissance of Indochina, in a recently independent Cambodia (1953), still de facto under the rule of a foreign nation. Kep was a daring experiment, the vanguard of a new Cambodia, the display of the avant-garde of the most modern, or modernist, country in South East Asia. To the average backpacker, Kep is cheap and tasty crabs, a white sand beach (spoiler: it’s fake), a sparsely populated town inexplicably spread wide.Īs the tropical dream of a French wealthy class, pretending to be adventurous for just being a colonist, Kep-sur-mer was founded in 1908 as a resort town where once were a few fishermen huts. Although to a distracted eye none of this may show. Kep is a fallen star, a dream that came untrue, an open wound, a memento, an unwilling memorial. Last updated: 26 June 2022 One of the abandoned modernist villas of Kep Kep, Cambodia – visiting the ghost villas
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