Vann Molyvann (1926–2017) was a Cambodian architect and urban planner, the pioneer of New Khmer Architecture, which joined modernism to Khmer tradition and to the country's climate and heavy rains. Born in Kampot province, he studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris until 1954. Back in Cambodia in 1956, he was made state architect and head of public works by Prince Norodom Sihanouk and built more than 100 structures, among them the Chaktomuk Conference Hall and the new town of Sihanoukville. He lived in exile in Switzerland through the civil war and the Khmer Rouge years, and from 1991 headed APSARA, the authority for Angkor, until his dismissal in 2001.
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The Independence Monument (Cambodia) in Phnom Penh (1962), marking independence from France in 1953, is a 37-metre lotus-shaped stupa in the manner of the temple at Banteay Srei. The National Olympic Stadium (1964), designed in 1962 for 60,000 spectators and ringed by a moat against flooding, was built in under two years; he considered it his greatest achievement. His other buildings in the capital include the Institute of Foreign Languages (1972).
