By Sebastian Strangio

Published in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 2010

A crumbling Mughal-era mansion in Dhaka’s old city. (Photo: Sebastian Strangio)

ACROSS Old Dhaka, decaying and sprawling mansions are hulking reminders of the city’s 19th-century commercial boom. Majestic, wrought-iron gates slump inward. Gardens are overgrown. Squatters have taken up residence in some of these empty shells, but mostly these Mughal-era (17th-19th century) structures are now regarded as less important than the land on which they sit.

Taimur Islam, an architect who heads the Urban Study Group, a Dhaka-based organization campaigning to have the old city designated as a protected area, says the pace of development spells an uncertain fate for the city’s architectural heritage. Since 2004, the group has created an inventory of about 3,000 historically significant structures in Old Dhaka, where a handful of buildings are razed daily. Mr. Taimur says that if the government took a more integrated approach to planning, it could accommodate the preservation of old buildings and also the needs of a ballooning population. It could even help reshape perceptions of Dhaka, one of the world’s fastest-growing megacities. “If it’s possible to restore all those important monuments under certain guidelines and come up with an integrated plan, the rest of the areas could be revitalized too,” he says.

One of Dhaka’s most arresting attractions is its magisterially bleak (or bleakly magisterial) national parliament, the Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban. Constructed from massive blocks of unfinished reinforced concrete bisected by simple triangles and circles, the building is perhaps the crowning work in the career of American architect Louis Khan. Although commissioned as the national parliament of Pakistan in the 1960s, the building wasn’t completed until 1982, well after Bangladesh gained its independence from “West Pakistan” and around the time that such brutal modernism began to seem a little passe. Still, Bangladeshis are justifiably proud of the building — according to Wikipedia, one of the largest legislative complexes in the world — which has since become something of a symbol of the young nation. Khan himself said of the strange, almost child-like profusion of geometric shapes that “It was not belief, not design, not pattern, but the essence from which an institution could emerge”. He also described its unique design as a “many-faceted precious stone, constructed in concrete and marble”.

Predictably, I had the privelege of seeing this greyest of grey buildings under an overcast sky. Lake Road, the wide boulevard running along the back side of the parliament, was lined with joggers, chaste young couples and posters of independence icon Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his daughter Sheikh Hasina, the current prime minister. Unfortunately, access to the inside of the building is restricted to casual visitors and guards direct a friendly but determined head-waggle at anyone seeking to walk past the checkpoints along the outer edges of the complex. Taimur Islam, the head of the Urban Study Group in Dhaka, told me that 48 hours’ notice is required for journalists to gain permission to see the inside of the building, but from my limited knowledge of South Asian bureaucracy, I imagine the process is considerably more protracted. (This is a stark contrast with Cambodia, where you can pretty much walk into any building not ringed with razorwire and armed guards, including — but not limited to — ministries and foreign embassies).

Kahn died of a heart attack in 1974 at New York’s Penn Station after returning from Bangladesh, leaving behind a slew of classic brutalist structures and plans for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park in New York, a commemoration of the late president. Kahn’s design for the park was abandoned after his death due to the city’s fiscal crisis, but was resurrected last year after an exhibition about the project’s history and a New York Times article published in 2005. It is apparently scheduled to begin construction soon. Kahn was also responsible for Yale University’s Centre for British Art, the Phillips Exeter Academy Library in New Hampshire and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. Several more projects, including a synagogue in Israel and a presidential palace in Islamabad, Pakistan, remained unbuilt after his death. Click here for more on Kahn and his work.

A section drawing of Kahn’s design for the parliament building.

Khmer New Year and the stifling heat of mid-April have conspired to cast a smothering blanket over Phnom Penh. Just about everything is shut: even the roadside barbers have folded up their chairs, unhooked their mirrors, and scattered back to the provinces to pursue the cycle of binge-eating, Buddhist offerings and family activities that marks the nation’s main annual holiday. At the height of noon, the park on Sothearos Boulevard is an empty expanse of rippling heat-mirages crowned with palms, mobile towers and the needle-points of Buddhist stupas. The streets nearby hum with sparse, listless traffic.

Since New Year in Cambodia lasts anywhere from three days to a week, we all crammed like crazy on Friday afternoon, gathering comments and making appointments before next week’s imposed curfew. Afterwards, we went to the sparkling new Phnom Penh Post office to see it blessed by a troupe of Buddhist monks, who chanted for a solid half-hour and showered the Post staff with holy water, jasmine flowers and jelly-cups. The Phnom Penh Centre, one of the city’s few dedicated office buildings, is a horrible eyesore, but the view from the new office on the eighth floor is nothing short of breathtaking. To the east lies the new Chinese-funded National Assembly building, all spires and rearing nagas, flanked by an empty lot (the new Australian Embassy), the Buddhist Institute and the Naga Casino — the latter a structure of monumental brutality, reveling like a pre-meltdown Chernobyl in its gleaming modernity. In the background — a distant brushstroke of aquamarine — lies the Tonle Bassac, thickening into khaki under the punishing sun.

The Front du Bassac apartment slums from the roof of the Phnom Penh Centre.

Westwards, the building gazes over the low sprawl of the city, a view dominated by the 300 metre-long Front du Bassac apartment slums (see March 23′s post ). As I have since learned, this entire portion of the riverfront was planned as a single housing project in the 1960s, and included three sets of apartments, a municipal park and the striking triangular prow of the Preah Suramarit Theatre, gutted by fire in 1994 and finally demolished, to the tearful anger of its architect, late last year. The Bassac slums have also been slated for demolition for some years now, but, like many things in Cambodia, the project seems to keep hitting bureaucratic roadblocks of one sort or another. While slum evictions are commonplace in Phnom Penh (they’re barely ‘news’ nowadays), the Bassac slum community is large and in uncomfortable proximity to the National Assembly. According to the government’s new Land Law, moreover, many of the inhabitants are also in legal possession of the buildings, and with a clutch of Western NGOs willing to raise hell in the courts, there’s little chance of an eviction happening soon and without fanfare. A second set of apartments, more distinguished in design, and better preserved — the old village for the athletes of the 1966 GANEFO games — sits to the north. Beyond that lies the third and most recent block, distinguished by its V-shaped roof, which was bought by the Russian Embassy in 1979 and is now used as housing for embassy staff.

The satisfaction one gets from following sport, like all human activities, is prey to the theory of rising expectations. Last week’s five-goal defeat of the Demons might as well have been a loss for all the enjoyment I got watching the game. Demons fans — who are now savouring anything better than a ten-goal defeat — would undoubtedly have enjoyed it more than Cats fans, for whom anything less than a ten-goal win now reeks of bitter failure. Last year’s Grand Final raised the bar impossibly high; now nothing short of the flawless, dizzying football that clinched the Premiership in ’07 will slake Cat fans’ awakened thirst for opposition blood. But things were different this week: I’ve always liked and feared the young St. Kilda outfit, torn between wanting to see them fail and wanting to see them raise the cup themselves sometime in the next few years. The game that rekindled my interest in football was the see-sawing Cats-Saints match at Skilled Stadium in late 2004, in which we scraped home by five points. Since then I’ve followed the rivalry with white-knuckled attentiveness.

The Saints’ strong start at Telstra Dome on Saturday afternoon was ominous, enough to bring on a twinge of that particular abdominal ache that must be unique to Geelong supporters. But almost as surely as our boys used to slowly, inexorably crumble under pressure, they now find a new gear and deftly brush the opposition aside: the pattern this year has been a slow-to-moderate opening quarter, followed by a blitzkrieg in the second and third and a listless trot home in the fourth. What a pleasure it was, sitting in a fly-blown internet café listening to the live 3AW stream, hearing the crowd rise in my cheap headphones as Steve Johnson, Chappy, Wojak, Jimmy Bartel and Joel Selwood dished out pain to the opposition! Football has become a welcome diversion overseas: home-town cultural indulgence and weekend relaxation rolled into one.

Like Saigon, Phnom Penh is booming, and the Cambodian nouveau riche — as nouveaux riches are wont to do – is busily casting about for new ways to flaunt its wealth. To service this new demographic, an old government hospital at the intersection of Sihanouk and Norodom Boulevards has recently been flattened to make way for a new 42-story gold skyscraper, branded ‘Gold Tower 42′ and imbued with all-but-supernatural powers by its Korean developers. Advertising published in The Cambodia Daily features a shining 24-carat plinth dripping fairy dust over the city, alongside claims that Gold Tower 42 will be a ‘new conceptual residential tower where every activity of hospital, bank, shopping mall, fitness centre, driving range to indoor swimming pool, and more are all achieved in one house’. More than that, the building is also hoped, somehow, to ‘improve the living standard of the world’ — a skyscraping aim if ever there was one. (In a strictly statistical sense, this may be true; but it’s an open question how much rice 42-stories of privately-owned, electrolytically-coated steel will put in the mouths of refugees from, say, western Sudan. But I digress).

As part of my research for a real estate story last week, I was able to visit the Gold Tower showroom, where a sales manager lavished me with a — what else? — gold tome of promotional material and waxed lyrical about the tower, which began construction on March 14. Yon Woo Cambodia Ltd. (‘Korea’s global symbolic developer’) claims that 72% of the apartments and commercial spaces have already been snapped up, going for anything from $460,000 to $1.6 million, indicating a level of local interest in inverse proportion to the dry cynicism of Phnom Penh’s expat community. I just hope Yon Woo has more luck than did the Australian developer who erected a ‘gold’ apartment building in Melbourne, only to be sued by the hundreds of Chinese who invested in the ‘lucky’ building and were outraged when it turned out a rather lustreless bronze.

Today I spent the morning in, sipping lychee cordial while watching Geelong’s 99-point cakewalk against the Bombers at Telstra Dome, and my sporting optimism knows no bounds. After thrashing Essendon — who I counted as a key challenger in ’08 — is there any team that seriously stands a chance against a full-strength Cats side? The plusses continue to mount: debutantes Ryan Gamble and Harry Taylor have made seamless transitions to the big league; Mathew Stokes is making the transition from punk draftee to elite midfielder; the young Tom Hawkins is crashing packs and dragging in marks like Tony Lockett; and Joel Selwood, Geelong’s next captain, is sashaying his way into Brownlow country — and all this on top of a nearly flawless 2007. We play lowly Melbourne at home next week, when several key players are set to return. I must remember to buy popcorn and soda pop.

Joel Selwood and Mark Blake in action against Essendon at Telstra Dome, March 30.

Phnom Penh is about two hours from the Vietnamese border, a trip broken only by a ubiquitous half-hour lunch stop and a short break at Neak Loung, where cars, buses, motos and pedestrians are borne across the Mekong on rusting ferries. Due to the abundance of foreign aid the highways here are well-sealed and, excepting a bumpy 40km coda of expansion works on the final approach into Phnom Penh, the hulking Sapaco tourist bus made good time. My arrival was smooth but otherwise inglorious. After a week-long spell in one of the city’s ubiquitous backpacker ghettos, I’ve finally found a permanent address, a second-floor apartment set in a quiet street close to the riverfront and the old National Assembly building:

No. 7Dz, Long Ngeth Street (St. 258)
Khan Chamcarmon
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
+855 (0) 17 606 885

The new edition of the Phnom Penh Post hit the streets on Friday, and we celebrated with tequila shots and beers at Cantina, a Mexican restaurant and dedicated Post watering-hole on the riverfront. For this first issue, I contributed stories about the release of a new court monitoring report — which paints a predictably dire picture of the country’s judiciary — and the arrival of a new 3G mobile network in Cambodia, for which I interviewed Christian pop-star Stacie Orrico (!) in the feathered expanses of Hotel Le Royal. I also received VIP tickets to the launch of the new network last Saturday, a free concert at the Olympic Stadium featuring Orrico and a line-up of local artists.

In the event, I spent more time taking photos of the stadium itself than I did of the performers. I’ve always been interested in the school of Khmer modernism that flourished briefly under Prince Sihanouk in the 1950s and 1960s before it was terminated by the civil war and the depredations of the Pol Pot era. Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium, built in 1964 and designed by Vann Molyvann, is one of the best remaining examples of this new style of Khmer modernism. Molyvann, a local architect who studied with Le Corbusier in France, was the leader of this architectural school whose close personal friendship with Sihanouk ensured him a series of major state commissions, including the Independence Monument, Preah Suramarit National Theatre (recently destroyed by fire) and several private villas for the Prince in Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville. (In the same style, though probably not designed by Molyvann, are the apartments — once white, now a sepulchral grey — that line the streets around O Russei Market in the centre of town).

Spectators at Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium, March 15.

Although Phnom Penh never hosted the Olympic Games — to Sihanouk’s consternation — the stadium was inaugurated when the city hosted its non-aligned equivalent, the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) in 1966. The village for the visiting athletes was built by Molyvann in the same angular style, a box-like line of apartments along the Tonle Bassac foreshore about 1km south of my apartment. ‘Le Front du Bassac’, as the housing development was then called, is today in a decrepit state, but a skeleton of high modernism can still be discerned beneath the peeling paintwork and twisted railings of the apartment blocks, now wreathed in electric cables and covered in the detritus of their inhabitants. My colleague Brendan is researching the heritage issues associated with these old buildings for the upcoming edition of the Post and I am keen to explore their history further. I’ll definitely write more on this during my stay, once I have a chance to visit some of the remaining buildings around the city.

With my mind occupied with Cambodian issues at work, I’ve been pursuing my other interests in my downtime. I already have a favourite book store nearby in Street 240 (a branch of Bangkok’s D’s Books) where I’ve procured vintage 1960s/1970s paperback copies of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gore Vidal’s Duluth, Von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and The Spice-Box of Earth, a 1961 collection of poetry by Leonard Cohen. There are also a couple of articles up on Arts & Letters Daily that I recommend: one by David Mamet in The Village Voice, disavowing what he calls ‘brain-dead liberalism’ (although like most Americans he misuses the term*) and an excellent essay by Christina Hoff Sommers, one of my favourite American intellectuals, on why universities can’t, and shouldn’t, pursue gender equality in the physical sciences. I’ve also acquired a copy of The Anti-Industrial Revolution, an obscure Ayn Rand polemic against the New Left, which is ruthless in its denunciation of the student ‘revolution’ of the 1960s. Although it matches radical left-wing theories with its own brand of heaven-sent certainty, the book is worth the price of admission ($3.50) for the following quote alone. Here is Rand on hippies:

Observe the hippies’ choice of clothing. It is not intended to make them look attractive, but to make them look grotesque. It is not intended to evoke admiration, but to evoke mockery and pity. One does not make oneself look like a caricature unless one intends one’s appearance to plead: Please don’t take me seriously.

I’m not sure I agree with Rand on every, or even most, issues; but man, she sure knows how to skewer an innocent.

* I am always perplexed by the American use of the term ‘liberal’. Liberalism, in its nineteenth-century sense, stands for free markets and individual rights. Americans use the word to denote almost the exact opposite: namely, strong government intervention in the economy. American ‘liberals’ are only liberal in the social — civil rights, pro-choice — sense of the term. Economically, their philosophy comes closer to statism or social democracy. This confusion of the history of political ideas — this tendency to call a spade a lettuce — only muddies an already complicated debate.