Student working to repair a model of Molyvann’s Grey Building. Image: The Molyvann Project

As part of this year’s Vann Molyvann Project Summer School, students Hayley Reiter and Jimmie Drummon from Parsons are collaborating with students from the Royal University of Fine Arts and Norton University to continue to document the work of Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann.

Molyvann (born 1933, lives and works in Siem Reap) is Cambodia’s foremost architect of the 1950s and 1960s. His work forms one of the most important collections of post-colonial buildings in the world and is of utmost importance to Cambodia’s modern architectural heritage known as New Khmer Architecture. All archival materials documenting Molyvann’s work were destroyed in the Cambodian Civil War. The Vann Molyvann Project seeks to document existing buildings in an effort to preserve Molyvann’s important and influential work.

Led by architect and urban researcher Pen Sereypagna, The Vann Molyvann Project: Summer School 2015 at SA SA BASSAC will act as a transparent architecture and research studio, designed to engage students and visitors alike. Visitors to SA SA BASSAC will be met with processes of collaboration, research, archiving and building around Vann Molyvann’s guiding principles, New Khmer Architecture, histories of urban development, and the model-making craft of the past and the technologies of architecture today.

Visitors are invited to navigate through an evolving exhibition of architectural models, drawings, information panels and maps while observing the processes of select students from Royal University of Fine Arts and Norton University in Phnom Penh and Parsons School of Design as they collaborate to finalize surveys of buildings and generate a public database of measured drawings, research social histories by through interviews and oral histories of inhabitants and users of Vann Molyvann’s buildings and, at the heart of the studio, build a model of the Olympic Stadium. Further context and experience is also offered in our reading and screening room, as well as our public programs on and offsite.

The Vann Molyvann Project: Summer School 2015 is made possible with funding by The United States Embassy in Phnom Penh, Parsons School of Design, and SA SA BASSAC. (Souce: The Vann Molyvann Project)