Temples of Cambodia

The temples of Cambodia are among the most complex and imposing architectural creations in the world, offering nothing less than the embodiment of Khmer culture. Over a period of five hundred years, successive rulers sought to build sacred spaces that bore witness to the presence of the gods and the legitimacy of the kings. Organised chronologically, this book opens with the modestly scaled brick structures of the seventh and eighth centuries and goes on to explore the first monumental temple mountains of the ninth century. Also examined are the technical advances enabling the fulfillment of a unique Khmer architectural vision in the tenth century, and the erection of the ambitious Baphuon temple mountain in the eleventh. All this sets the stage for the apogee of the Khmer empire in the twelfth century, and with it, the construction of three massive temple complexes: Beng Mealea, Bakan, and the supreme architectural creation of Cambodia, Angkor Wat. In this book, not only do Barry Brukoff's photographs record temples that have been destroyed or vandalized but they offer something more: a uniquely intimate insight into the Cambodian idiom. The viewer is drawn into the picture plane and can sense the interior wonders of the monuments, so that for the first time a two-dimensional expression succeeds in invoking the third, in inviting the reader to penetrate to the heart of the temples' mystery.