Series – Modernist architecture of villas, Kep – Cambodia

Founded in 1908, Kep  was 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

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

« With the Lon Nol coup Kep became a ghost town, abandoned by holiday makers and sometimes swamped by the war raging in nearby Vietnam. Around 1970 Vietnamese soldiers entered Kep and are said to have eaten all of the animals in the zoo. That was positively civilized behavior compared to the actions of Cambodia’s own revolutionaries a few years later.

The Khmer Rouge took Kep in 1975 and set about destroying its symbols of bourgeois culture, attacking the already abandoned holiday homes of Cambodia’s elite. They also set about destroying any remnants of the bourgeoisie in Kep by herding all the local French speakers to a petrol station and setting it and them on fire.

An overgrown abandoned villa at Kep looks almost like a relic from an ancient Khmer era. When the Vietnamese arrived in 1979 the houses again suffered with locals stripping what was left for building materials to sell to the Vietnamese. The town itself continued to live in fear with the Khmer Rouge shifting just seven kilometers away. »

Fri, 28 September 2001, Bill Bainbridge for the Phnom Penh Post

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.

Thanksfully the lush vegetation has reclaimed is right and brings a fragile serenity in everyday life along the coast