{"id":610,"date":"2016-01-14T10:07:28","date_gmt":"2016-01-14T09:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/\/?p=610"},"modified":"2024-02-19T07:17:43","modified_gmt":"2024-02-19T06:17:43","slug":"villas-kep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/gallery\/documentary\/villas-kep","title":{"rendered":"Series – Modernist architecture of villas, Kep – Cambodia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Founded in 1908, Kep \u00a0was the seaside resort for French and later wealthy Cambodians. Called Kep-sur-Mer, the lifestyle in this locality was compared to a Cambodian Riviera with over three hundred villas with ocean views. The architecture is not of French colonial as one might imagine, but in the modernist architecture style of the 50s called New Khmer Architecture<\/a><\/p>\n

From the 70s, the coup of Lon Nol marked the end of this golden age by the start of civil war.\u00a0Inert buildings, these villas have been impassive witnesses to the ferocity of the fighting between Cambodians as well as the Vietnamese intervention\u00a0:<\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0With the Lon Nol coup Kep became a ghost town, abandoned by holiday makers and sometimes\u00a0swamped by the war raging in nearby Vietnam. Around 1970 Vietnamese soldiers entered\u00a0<\/em>Kep and are said to have eaten all of the animals in the zoo.\u00a0That was positively civilized behavior compared to the actions of Cambodia’s own\u00a0<\/em>revolutionaries a few years later.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Khmer Rouge took Kep in 1975 and set about destroying its symbols of bourgeois\u00a0culture, attacking the already abandoned holiday homes of Cambodia’s elite. They\u00a0<\/em>also set about destroying any remnants of the bourgeoisie in Kep by herding all the\u00a0local French speakers to a petrol station and setting it and them on fire.<\/em><\/p>\n

An overgrown abandoned villa at Kep looks almost like a relic from an ancient Khmer era.\u00a0When the Vietnamese arrived in 1979 the houses again suffered with locals stripping\u00a0<\/em>what was left for building materials to sell to the Vietnamese. The town itself continued\u00a0to live in fear with the Khmer Rouge shifting just seven kilometers away.\u00a0<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n

Fri, 28 September 2001,\u00a0Bill Bainbridge for the Phnom Penh Post<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The abandonment and decay for over 30 years have transformed these villas in blockhouses. The interior burned, blackened facade, only their structures remain like the skeletons of dead bodies on a battlefield. The windows are black holes letting ghosts lurking freely when night falls.<\/p>\n

Thanksfully the\u00a0lush vegetation has reclaimed is right and brings a fragile serenity in everyday life along the coast<\/p>\n

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Original Text in French<\/i><\/h5>\n\t\t
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Fond\u00e9e en 1908, Kep fut le lieu de vill\u00e9giature des Fran\u00e7ais puis des riches cambodgiens. Appel\u00e9 Kep-sur-Mer, le mode de vie dans cette localit\u00e9 fut compar\u00e9 \u00e0 une Riviera cambodgienne avec plus de trois cents villas construites. L\u2019architecture n\u2019est pas de type coloniale fran\u00e7aise comme on pourrait l\u2019imaginer mais dans le style moderniste des ann\u00e9es 50 appel\u00e9 La Nouvelle Architecture Khmer<\/p>\n

Dans les ann\u00e9es 70, le coup d\u2019\u00e9tat de Lon Nol marqua la fin de cet \u00e2ge d\u2019or par le d\u00e9but de guerre civile.<\/p>\n

B\u00e2timents inertes, ces villas ont \u00e9t\u00e9 les t\u00e9moins impassibles de la f\u00e9rocit\u00e9 des combats autant entre Cambodgiens des deux camps que dans l\u2019intervention vietnamienne.<\/p>\n

L\u2019abandon et le d\u00e9labrement pendant plus de 30 ans ont transform\u00e9 ces villas en blockhaus. Les int\u00e9rieurs brul\u00e9s, la fa\u00e7ade noircie, seules leurs structures subsistent, tels les squelettes de cadavres sur un champ de bataille. Ouvertures b\u00e9antes, les fen\u00eatres sont autant de trous noirs laissant r\u00f4der les fant\u00f4mes librement quand la nuit tombe<\/p>\n

Mais la luxuriante v\u00e9g\u00e9tation a repris ses droits et apporte une fragile s\u00e9r\u00e9nit\u00e9 \u00e0 la vie quotidienne qui revient peu \u00e0 peu le long de la c\u00f4te<\/p>\n

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The abandonment and decay for over 30 years have transformed these villas in blockhouses. The interior burned, blackened facade, only their structures remain like the skeletons of dead bodies on a battlefield. The windows are black holes letting ghosts lurking freely when night falls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":624,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[359,391,86],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5483,"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions\/5483"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inlen.photo\/vi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}