Who doesn’t love an old pile? If you’ve just flounced into Pochentong from one of those mid-year holidays, you might have eaten cake off a marble dolphin while gazing up Versailles’ frothy petticoats. That dreamboat Gaudi and his loopy landmarks were possibly on your summer To-Ogle list. Maybe you paid through the nose to lollop past Giza’s famous tetrahedrons on a stinking dromedary. The pipeystripey Pompidou might be more your bag, and you don’t have to be French or Tom Hanks to crack le Canon at les Pyramides. The Great Wall, the Grand Canal or even the comparatively medium-sized but still imposing Big Pineapple are worthy exemplars of humanity’s knack with a brick. And don’t get me started on the eye-watering erections in Petra, Atlantis (just testing), Kathmandu, MacchuPichu and everywhere Greco-Roman. Closer to home you’ve got yer luvverly big wats: Angkor, Bayon, Ta Prom and the regrettably underrated Wat Phnom. If you haven’t gone there early on a soft CharmingVille Sunday, I think you should. Totter up the easy back way, round by the museum (those front steps are a publicly humiliating myocardial infarction just waiting to happen.
My personal penchant, bricks ‘n’ mortar-wise, are the mainly public buildings with noble Sangkum bones that tremble on the brink of extinction with every ominous, pile-driven thud. I’m not the sharpest angle on the floorplan, but I know what I like and I like anything by that home-grown architectural alpha and omega Mister Vann MolyVann and his mid-century band of swingin’ draughters. His buildings are smart and considered and lyrical. Every wing and buttress is designed with so much care for us tropical humans and our hot, soggy surrounds as to seem empathic. His lecture halls at RUPP’s Faculty of Foreign Languages sit amidst venerable banyans, up on their haunches like elegant space-frogs. They have shutters like gills and voids on top and rain spouts that will help cool a building faster. To capture the light or not, as needed. To soothe and breathe with a pleasing spaciousness. Each of MolyVann’s remaining buildings is precisely crafted to serve complex demands – perfect for its purpose – meaningfully composed with dignified, elegant simplicity at precisely the sweet spot where natural law, practical need and sheer beauty get it on. They give me shivers.
Yet as this town’s philistines plumb mediocrity’s dumb fundament and the venal clamour grows for another preposterous Angry Bird Bank or monstrous blot on our riverine horizon, it seems that my favourite quietly cool, almost sentient structures are not long for this unlovely, unloveable, shoddy new landscape.
Which is why, every month or so, I collect on The Hubster’s doghouse points (he gets them for things like coming home pissed as a lord on the night we were ‘sposed to go to that Meta House thing. OK, so, fair play. But still). His penance is to help me prise open rusty gates, slash through poison ivy, wake hysterically barking dogs and tiptoe through an arse-ton of nameless ordure to snap away at little gems of architectural genius. Actually, in the case of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, we just walked through a freshly painted gate as the security guy tipped his fedora. But anyway.
So last Sunday, early, we went to the White Building, aka the Bodeng, designed by Lu Ban Hup and Vladimir Bodiansky and overseen by Mr V. It’s not the first time I’ve been inside. When the elections were on, our little mates in Law Enforcement wheeled out their spanking new razor wire and put up barricades between the side of town I live on and my work. After a bit of argy bargy with a succession of nadless tuk tuk drivers, I found my own way through: in one door, up the stairs, across the breezeways above the blockades and back down the other side. It was like Grand Central Station in there. They even had buskers and a stern old bird sitting in her doorway keeping things tight with her palm fan and a vicious, yappy little underbite on legs.
This last visit I could see how wide and long these dark corridors really are. At that time of day strips of light dazzle under east side doors like the alien arrival, the busy open breezeways cut with hard morning angles and shadows. You can feel your pupils dilate and contract over and over adjusting to the mad, relentless chiaroscuro. Some apartments were locked and shuttered, some people had just their grilles pulled across: kids watching TV, a lady sewing magenta cushions in a royal-blue room, a madhouse of arguments and one dim place with nothing but a solitary rooster crowing inside. Drop cloths and scaffolding stood near a wall swathed in fresh Tiffany blue. Murals and kids, little shops and monks paying visits, pregnant mums chit-chatting in doorways. And those damn yappy dogs.
Though I know there are dark stories inside, the life domestic triumphed on this sunny Sunday am. You applaud the tenacious foliage cascading from cracks three storeys up and ignore the shit piles in the odd derelict stairway. Though its face needs a damn good wash, the White Building’s heart beats strong and regular and it breathes in living, vibrant colour despite its name. The foundations seem as sturdy as any other living place in town. It was built for the long haul, but like Olympic Stadium and the 100 Houses and all the good people who have no place like home, it’s in for a fight. As I stood on the roof amid billows of freshly laundered kramas, I felt the Building’s roots, like toes in sand, burrow deeper, hanging on for dear life.