Cambodia: The new Khmer architecture

It's sunset at Phnom Penh's Olympic Stadium. Across the top ring of concrete seating hundreds of Cambodians – mostly women over 55 – are doing the mashed potato in front of several sound systems. Next is a gangnam-style move. Beside the throng, sugar-cane juice stalls and makeshift beer stands sell refreshments. Here, open-air aerobic dance classes happen at dawn and dusk every day. Down by the pool there are yoga classes, kids are jumping off the diving boards and on the field local teams are playing soccer. But I'm not here to watch sport and recreation, I'm busy admiring the architecture. In the undercover area where a volleyball game is taking place, we walk in the extreme humidity to the very top. Our guide, a final-year architecture student, Virak Roeun, asks us to take a seat.

"Feel that breeze?" he says.

He points to architect Vann Molyvann's suspended zig-zag roof lines enabling air and light to filter in freely through the vented walls. There is a moat of cooling pools and streams along the walkways, an imitation of the moats surrounding Angkor Wat.

Indeed, the temples of Angkor Wat are not the only incredible structures worth seeking out on a trip to Cambodia. I'm on a 1960s New Khmer architecture tour with run by small association that began 12 years ago by British architect Geoff Pyle.

After gaining independence from France in 1953, Cambodia, for a period, experienced a cultural renewal. New creative movements emerged in art, film, dance and design. It was a time of optimism and experimentation. Musicians such as Sinn Sisamouth made the 60's swing. The Royal Ballet sent people into the forests to record traditional folk dances to incorporate them into modern dance. At the centre of this progressive time was a building boom out of which "New Khmer Architecture" emerged, with Cambodian-born architect Vann Molyvann, who studied at the Ecole Des Beaux Arts, leading the way. His structures, including the Olympic Stadium built in 1963 for the cancelled Games of the New Emerging Forces reinterpreted European modernism mixed with Khmer elements, incorporating local tradition, materials and taking the climate in account.

But the movement was short-lived after the Khmer Rouge forcibly depopulated the capital city, with residents fleeing to the countryside. It's estimated 90 per cent of Cambodia's artists died under Pol Pot's genocidal regime. Sisamouth was executed. Molyvann spent 20 years exiled in Europe.

Virak has already taken us by tuk-tuk to Molyvann's 100 Houses project, a stilted social housing development commissioned in 1965 by the National Bank of Cambodia for its staff. We find out that Vann Molyvann oriented his buildings north to avoid direct sunlight and buildings were raised off the ground as Phnom Penh is prone to monsoonal floodings. But his incredible designs incorporating cross ventilation green technologies, indirect lighting and evaporative cooling are not favoured by today's developers. Recently the land where the watered moat was around the Olympic Stadium was sold off to make way for poorly planned high-rise towers.