The municipal housing tenement in downtown Phnom Penh’s Tonle Bassac district is known locally simply as “Building”. It makes an improbable tourist destination. Yet from the vantage of a cafe opposite, I witness a series of westerners pulling up in tuk-tuks, jumping out for a snapshot, then retreating to the more prosaic splendor of the Royal Palace, the National Museum, etc. Building has a reputation as a “dark place”.
Built in the 60’s under supervision of Cambodia’s foremost architect Vann Molyvann, it was conceived as a low rent solution in the spirit of “concrete without fear”: a modernist’s dream. Four stories and 325 meters of rhythmic balconies and stone lattice work give it the appearance of an Ottoman fort. In a photo from the late 60’s, it is startlingly beautiful: blistering white, surrounded by gardens, as if advertising Eastern European utopia imagined by Disney rather than Stalin.
Today it has come to represent housing problems rather than solutions. It is teeming with over 3000 people. Billowing laundry and piles of rubble disrupt Building’s form. It is crumbling and unkempt. There are open gashes in the structure and broken iron handrails are lashed together with electrical wire. It feels like a strong gust of wind will raze it to the ground. The ground floor was designed open plan to allow air to ventilate the building, but is now jammed with businesses. There are restaurants, hairdressers, computer repair shops.
Young people sing along to Cambodian MTV style pop in coffee shops. Languid traffic snakes up and down its five stairwells. A night worker sleeps in a hammock strung up between the railings, profiting from the afternoon breeze. Impromptu grocery stalls in the corridors sell fruit, soda, candy and cigarettes. Kids and babies coalesce and scatter like ants. Pot plants, Buddhist offerings and mats of drying rice leftovers litter the hallways.
On the street, brokers for brothels keep an eye out for trade. Hawkers ply noodles and sugarcane juice. People gamble over chess games, cards games, throwing slipper games, anything in fact… Life sprouts up like weeds out of the cracks disrupting architectural unity for another kind of beauty. This is not what modernists dream.
- Building corridor
Building was evacuated by Pol Pot’s regime in 1975 along with the rest of the city’s population in the drive to create a model agrarian society. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the newly appointed Minister of Culture allocated the block to house performance artists, since it was adjacent to the National Theater. This beautiful building also had a turbulent history; It survived the civil war, being retained by the Khmer Rouge for official visits and propaganda pageants, only to burn down while undergoing restoration work in 1994.
Despite the absence of the theater, Building retains a working population of musicians, singers and dancers. Naturally, many of the apartments have changed hands or are rented out, bringing to it a diverse make up. The social relations formed are intriguing. Clients of the brothels are known to book local musicians and classic dancers to perform at their weddings. Students at the nearby universities renting rooms here pick up aspects of the underworld gang culture and feed it back to their less adventurous classmates.
The structure is divided into six blocks, each of which has its own subtly distinct atmosphere. Building is in fact a collection of villages. The sex-workers and drug addicts occupy the northern end. To the south are a number of thriving community organisations and NGOs. Aziza teach English to children. The Sa Sa Gallery, founded by a collective of Cambodian up-and-coming young artists, has a project room here where they host talks and exhibitions. There’s a health clinic here. I’ve come to discover there’s a lot of myth-making about this place both from inside and out; Its dark reputation is somewhat exaggerated.
I’m hanging out here with my video camera, recording people’s stories and taking portraits, in an attempt to capture in microcosm what life in Cambodia is like today. The more I see, the more complicated and overwhelming that task seems to be.
In any case, the future of Building is clear. It doesn’t have one. It occupies prime real estate and the area has been dearcated for redevelopment by the government in a climate of speculative land deals. Although the inhabitants command high market prices for these properties [a tiny 2 bedroom flat goes for about $20,000] no-one here seriously expects adequate compensation for relocation. Strong arm tactics were allegedly used to evict residents from Boeng Kak Lake district, and no doubt property developers will have their way here too.
Phnom Penh was once known as the Paris of South East Asia, but it seems there’s little sense of the cultural value of old buildings. Molyvann’s Council of Ministers building was ripped down, his athletes’ village for the Asian Games, a similar but up market residential block just a stone’s throw away known as “The Grey Building”, was “restored”: i.e was knocked down and rebuilt into an ugly block that looks like a garment factory. Molyvann says of this destruction that an architect doesn’t expect to outlive his work. I feel lucky to have the chance to document Building while it’s still here.
Alnoor Dewshi
Tags: Alnoor Dewshi, Building, Phnom Penh, Tonle Bassac, Vann Molyvann
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