Angkor: Sketches of an Ancient City

06/05/2010 - 15:00

6 May 2010
15:00 - 17:30 hrs

Venue: IIAS, Rapenburg 59, Leiden

IIAS is pleased to announce the launch of Gregory B. Bracken’s book Angkor: Sketches of an Ancient City. The book launch will be preceded by a lecture by Dr. Olivier Cunin.

15.00 – 15.05 Welcome by Dr. Philippe Peycam, Director IIAS

15.05 – 16.15 Lecture by Dr. Olivier Cunin (Research Center in Architecture and Engineering of the National Architecture School of Nancy, France)  - From Ta Prohm to Bayon

16.15 – 16.30 Introduction to the book 'Angkor: Sketches of an Ancient City' by Dr. Gregory B. Bracken (IIAS / DSD)

16.30 – 17.30 Drinks

 From Ta Prohm to Bayon by Dr. Olivier Cunin

“From Ta Prohm to Bayon” presents the main results of a comparative analysis of the architectural history of the Buddhist Khmer temples built during the reign of king Jayavarman VII (1181-c.1218). This research was carrying out during the last ten years in Cambodia and Thailand where these temples are mainly distributed. They are more and less collapsed. Some previous studies have demonstrated that monuments from the apogee of the Khmer empire were the results of various construction phases. The elaboration of the individual architectural history and the global chronology sequence of these series of monuments associated to the enigmatic Bayon temple in Angkor Thom are the main purposes of this present research. The methodology used to elucidate these four-dimensional puzzles is based on three “readings”:

• a building archaeology analysis elaborated at the beginning of 1980s for the studies of the civil medieval architecture in Europe.
• a stylistic analysis based on the works of Philippe Stern, author of the main art history research on the Bayon style.
• an archaeometry study in collaboration with Waseda University (Tokyo) focusing on the magnetic susceptibility of the sandstone mainly used to the construction of the Khmer temples since the 11th century.

Beyond the “stone skeleton”, the wooden structures that have originally completed the Bayon style temples were included in the architectural history of each main complex of Jayavarman VII. This combination of the “mineral” and “organic” structures enabled new archaeological reconstructions and interpretations of theirs spatial application.The four hierarchical typologies identified organized the large architectural program of Jayavarman VII, probably to manage his kingdom space.

'Angkor: Sketches of an Ancient City' by Dr. Gregory B. Bracken

Angkor was capital of an ancient Khmer Empire. Home to more than one million people at its height, it was famed for its magnificent temples and palaces and ruled over most of Southeast Asia a thousand years ago. It was abandoned in the fifteenth century and swallowed up by the jungle. It slumbered for more than four hundred years before being rediscovered by a French explorer in the middle of the nineteenth century. It immediately captured the world’s imagination, and is now a World Heritage Site.

Lying scattered across a vast terrain, this ancient Cambodian capital contains magnificent complexes of buildings all in various stages of decay. Yet all are testament to the genius of the wealthy and sophisticated race who built them more than a millennium ago. Some structures inspire by their sheer size, but Angkor Wat, the most famous temple in the complex, as well as being the world’s largest, has an intricacy of construction and a serenity of setting that sets it apart. Architect Gregory Byrne Bracken’s colourful sketches give a flavour of these jungle-clad ruins, while his concise descriptions of the art, architecture and history of this remarkable place makes for an indispensable guide to a long lost world.

Information & Registration
Ms Martina van den Haak, MA
m.c.van.den.haak@iias.nl
+31 71 5273317