Protecting Cambodia’s Floating Villages

The Boston Architectural College will exhibit top design entries from Protecting Cambodia’s Floating Villages, an international design competition sponsored by London architecture and design magazine Eleven. Andrea Verenini, PhD, the magazine’s editor, will give a gallery talk about the competition on Friday, October 7 at 6 pm.

The competition ran in support of the Angkor Hospital for Children, a NGO based in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Architects and designers from all over the world were asked to develop plans for floating medical, research, and educational structures to serve the 1.2 million people on Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake. The residents mostly live in nomadic floating villages. The competition was aimed at finding new ways to protect the local population and their culture and the lake’s ecosystem, which is home to rare species of birds and fish.

In bringing the exhibit to the BAC, Dean of Architecture Karen Nelson, who also directs the gallery, explained, “The issue of water is the environmental issue of the globe… and this competition focusing on Cambodia and the ecology and culture of the Tonle Sap Lake really highlights the intense interactions between and among the people, their work, their cultural heritage, and their water safety. This architectural competition brings all these issues together.”

More than 601 people from 51 countries made up the 243 teams that competed in this event. The exhibit was previously shown at the KPF’s Gallery in London.

^{Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia}

^{Floating village in Tonle Sap Lake. Photos by Jason Eppink / CC BY 2.0}