Architecture and Its Models in South-East Asia (review)

Jacques Dumarçay's latest book on architecture should be more accurately titled "An Architect's Collection of Insights into Khmer and Javanese Temple Construction." Within an average of forty-two pages of text the author discusses a variety of points involving no less than forty-five Khmer monuments and nearly forty Javanese structures. This dizzying tour de force barely touches the surface of the architectural knowledge of the author, but it leaves an uninitiated reader at the starting gate. Without an intimate and thorough experience of Khmer and Javanese temples, the reader will soon be lost in a tangle of affirmations and technical descriptions. It is also hard to understand why a book on Southeast Asian architecture would include structures in England, Goa, Japan, India, and France.

Dumarçay is someone I have long admired for his vast and profound knowledge of Khmer and Javanese temples. This book, however, does not do justice to how he arrived at many of the statements or theories he proposes. If he had supplied a more thorough background the book would be easier to understand. He could have excluded the second chapter on the reservoirs at Angkor in favor of expanding other sections on the meaning or use of models in architecture, the purported theme of the small book. In some instances, as in chapter 3, "Successive Models of the Same Monument," he would have fared better by staying with only one monument. Instead, he covers a multiplicity of temples ranging from the Borobudur to the Bakheng in a hopscotch fashion that inevitably leaves several gaps from large to small. For example, he tells us that the Borobudur was constructed in three stages: the first stage comprised two terraces in a pyramidal form; in the second, the width of the stairways was unified and a base was added to the walls of the first level. Although the text cites only these two differences, related to Dumarçay's theory that Hinduism emphasized perspective and Buddhism did not, the most impressive difference (that of the plan of the upper elevation) is never mentioned. It is illustrated in Figure 38 but not discussed. As for the final stage, it is not described or illustrated, yet readers may not have a clear memory of the upper elevation. We are referred to a 1956 work by Stutterheim to fill in the blanks.

That leads to another problem. It has been nearly a half-century since Stutterheim's work. Surely references to the meaning of the monument should include such basic works as Barabudur: History and Significance of a Buddhist Monument, edited by Luis Gomez and Hiram Woodward (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Buddhist Studies Series, 1981). Dumarçay only includes four or five works in English in his footnotes (there is no bibliography); the vast majority of cited works are in French.

Without keeping abreast of the most recent scholarship it can be dangerous to postulate theories and not prove them. When he states, "the instruments [the Khmers] used to determine the positioning of structures were very simple" ( p. 101), he bases the statement on tools and instruments illustrated in bas-reliefs at the Bayon, hardly the ultimate and definitive source on Khmer instruments. But more importantly, he implies that simple instruments meant errors in construction and uses some anomalies at Ta Keo to illustrate his point. It is quite possible that the instruments themselves were simple; I do not know. But the results were spectacular. Look what Michelangelo achieved with a chisel.

Since the extraordinary precision found in the measurements of Angkor Wat could be understood to contradict his statement, Dumarçay—in this and many similar instances—needs to take a broader range of facts into account. The precise measurements at Angkor Wat have been published since 1968 in a volume well known to Dumarçay. As I stated in my book on Angkor Wat, when...