CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Thu Jul 02, 2020 5:29 pm How to Preserve Vann Molyvann’s $7M House


Sothie: Personally, I think the owners of the house should sell it to Phnom Penh City Hall at a reasonable price. Then, the local authorities should preserve the house by turning it into a museum, a sort of historical site if you like.
https://cambodianess.com/article/how-to ... s-7m-house

Poor misguided Sothie,

I can only imagine what the wonderful, responsible, people at PP City Hall would do with it, with their long track record of preserving historical buildings and town planning. Buy it at discount with some half assed promises of preserving it as cultural heritage before selling it at an inflated price for Royal group to put a mall on or something

John Bingham wrote: ↑Thu Jul 02, 2020 7:17 pm

whatwat wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 9:57 pm I doubt the family have owned it for a long time. Wasn’t the last time he was there the 70s?

It was built for him and although he was abroad for about 20 years the SOC government gave him his house back when he returned in 1991 and he lived there. He said they found some untouched skiing equipment that had been left there since 1970. He worked in high positions as below but fell out of favor with the powers that be. He said he didn't like how the house was almost hidden now among higher buildings so in his final years he lived in Siem Reap and the house was rented out.

In 1970 the Sangkum Reastr Niyum came to a brutal end with the coup d'état led by General Lon Nol. Vann, who had been the Sangkum's longest serving Minister of Education, relocated to Switzerland with his family. He worked for the United Nations Human Settlements Programme for 10 years before eventually returning to Cambodia in 1991 where he served as President of the Council of Ministers, Minister of Culture, Fine Arts, Town and Country Planning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vann_Molyvann#Death

I refrained from Wiki as I remembered I’d read it before but my foggy brain failed me. Thanks JB.

I can only imagine he’d become “politically motivated” (notice it’s in quotes) and as you said fell out of favour. My only hope is is when Cambodia emerges into the world he’s revered as an icon by the powers that be and his accomplishments are part of the curriculum so future generations can be educated.

All hail Molyvann!

A Modernist Architect’s Home Is Threatened by Modern Developers
Architect Vann Molyvann is known as the man who built Cambodia. Now his own home could become yet another generic skyscraper.
By Sheridan Prasso
9 September 2020, 06:01 CEST


Photo Courtesy of IPS Cambodia

Amid the honking horns of a busy Asian capital lies an elegant residential oasis — a four-bedroom, parabolic-roofed architectural gem. Built in 1966 as the home-atelier of one of East Asia’s greatest architects, it is said to be a window into his soul.

The house of Vann Molyvann — the builder of Cambodia’s modernist classics — carries architectural importance on the scale of Frank Lloyd Wright homes. Yet it doesn’t carry their protections. Listed for sale in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, for $7 million, the home has no preservation law, conservation regulation or heritage designation to save it. A buyer would be free to tear it down and put up a new commercial building or shopping mall, just like the many nearby that have driven up land values along the busy boulevard it abuts.

The children of Vann Molyvann, who inherited their childhood home upon his death in 2017 at age 90, favor a buyer who has preservation in mind, according to the listing agent, IPS Cambodia. But that may not be enough. A call to turn the home into a museum — to help promote Phnom Penh’s unique architecture as a tourist attraction and an alternative to its current genocide-related tourism sites — has neither political will nor funding behind it.

“The price pressure on the land is so strong that it would overwhelm any nostalgia about the past,” says Helen Grant Ross, a British-French architect who uses the term “New Khmer Architecture” to define Vann Molyvann’s unique style merging European modernism with classic Cambodian design elements. “Sadly, it’s an excellent location for a skyscraper.”

This tension between preservation and modernization is pervasive in the developing world and particularly evident in Southeast Asian cities that have been flooded with Chinese and Korean investment over the past decade, pushing up demand for real estate. In Phnom Penh’s prime districts like the one where Vann Molyvann’s home resides, land that cost $600 a square meter in 2006 more than tripled to $2,000 by 2010, and has tripled again to around $6,000 today. The asking price for the Vann Molyvann home and its surrounding quarter-acre of land breaks down to $7,575 per square meter — a possible deterrent to buyers looking to use the land for a new development project.

Cambodia’s efforts at preservation so far have primarily been aimed at the country’s rich heritage of Angkor Wat, the 12th century temple complex in central Siem Reap that draws millions in tourist dollars every year. It and two other Cambodian temples are listed by Unesco as World Heritage sites. None of the approximately 100 buildings credited to Vann Molyvann are.

It’s a tragic oversight for a man who is the equivalent of America’s Wright, France’s Le Corbusier and Japan’s Tadao Ando combined, and all the more significant because of the country’s colonial and genocidal past, Grant Ross says. “It’s just because he happened to be from an insignificant country where they don’t promote him,” she says by phone from France where she now lives after a dozen years in Phnom Penh that included consulting for the Cambodian government, lecturing at the Royal University of Fine Arts and co-authoring a book, “Building Cambodia: New Khmer Architecture 1953-1970.”
Full article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... lab-design