The Sleuk Rith Institute: Zaha Hadid's soft hymn to Cambodia's fallen

The Sleuk Rith Institute: Zaha Hadid's soft hymn to Cambodia's fallen


Built to house a vast archive of documents about the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, in which two million people lost their lives, the Sleuk Rith Institute is to be a radical shift for its architect Zaha Hadid – who has gone from violent geometry to warm wood
The Sleuk Rith Institute – in pictures

The south facade of the Sleuk Rith Institute in Phnom Penh. Photograph courtesy of the Institute


Oliver Wainwright

Friday 10 October 2014 18.04 BST
69 comments


Looking like a futuristic descendant of Angkor Wat, with a cluster of chiselled forms poking up above the trees, Cambodia is to receive a new genocide museum and research institute, designed by London-based Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. Unveiled 35 years after the end of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal reign, the Sleuk Rith Institute will incorporate a museum, research centre, graduate school, document archives and research library, set in an expansive new park south of the centre of the capital, Phnom Penh.

The project is the vision of human-rights activist Youk Chhang, 53, who has directed the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam) since 1995. He amassed a vast archive detailing the atrocities of the regime led by Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979, when two million Cambodians were slaughtered.

“We have to live with a long, dark shadow,” says Chhang, who lost his sister, as well as aunts and uncles, to Pol Pot’s reign of terror. “We cannot escape it, but we shouldn’t be enslaved by it. I want the institute to bring something new and hopeful, and get us out of the mindset of being victims.”

The complex is planned to serve as a centre for genocide studies across Asia, with a strong educational and outreach component, and shares its site with a local high school – formerly home to a Khmer Rouge re-education camp. The land has been donated by the Cambodian government and a $35m fundraising campaign launched, with some funding already committed by USAID, sponsor of DC-Cam’s work to date.

Over the last two decades, Chhang and his team have compiled an archive of over a million documents, photographs, tapes and films, as well as mapped 200 prisons and 20,000 mass graves across the country. From confidential reports describing conditions in the countryside, where a million died of starvation, to confessions under torture of thousands of prisoners killed by the secret police, the archive provided essential evidence during the trial of two former Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan, 83, and Nuon Chea, 88, who were finally convicted of crimes against humanity in August this year.The entrance to the Sleuk Rith Institute. Photograph courtesy of the Institute

“The tribunal it is one of the processes needed to lay the foundations for healing and reconciliation,” says Chhang. “But you can’t erase such a deep-cut memory.” He lifts a trouser leg to reveal a substantial scar running down his calf, the result of beatings at the forced labour camp where he was taken at the age of 14. His sister was to suffer a more gruesome fate: accused of stealing rice, the guards slashed her stomach open – to find it empty – and left her to die.

“It’s like a silent heart attack,” says Chhang. “You think you’re all right, but then it comes back. I want the institute to break the silence, but it must be optimistic and look to the future. So many of these memorial museums are depressing, and you leave with a sense of anger, not forgiveness. They are usually designed by men, so I thought maybe a woman could do it better.”

Zaha Hadid has brought her trademark language of sinuous lines, but she has consciously eschewed some of her more violent geometries, making a building that promises to be unusually attuned to its context. The five functions have been separated into a cluster of individual buildings, echoing the five towers of Angkor Wat, while their structures are formed from great timber columns that split and entwine, like the writhing roots that enlace the ancient stone temples.The library of the Sleuk Rith Institute. Photograph courtesy of the Institute

“This is very different to our other projects,” says Hadid. “It is the first time we have used wood, to create a warmer, softer mood, and in time it will weather and take on a more a natural-looking feel.”
Advertisement
At first glance, the tapering forms recall some of her recent tower proposals, chopped off at the knees. But a closer look reveals the design of an intricate web of spaces and arcades formed by the intersection of the timber structures, surrounded by reflecting pools (which also drain rainwater to prevent floods) and threaded by a network of causeways and bridges.

“We were inspired by how the ancient temples make very intricate forms from simple geometries,” says project architect DaeWha Kang, describing the five-day “bootcamp” Chhang took them on around the country, an unusually immersive process for the office.

The choice of Hadid’s practice for such a project might raise eyebrows, given her track record of working for regimes with appalling records of human rights abuses, from the Heydar Aliyev centre in Azerbaijan, for which residents were forcibly evicted, to the World Cup stadium in Qatar, where in July, labourers were found to be paid less than £5 a day.

“You don’t choose an architect because of who they have worked with before,” says Chhang. “Architecture can be a tool to change the vision of a corrupted system. A painter can’t do that, but an architect can.”

“I think architects can sometimes influence the situation for the better,” says Hadid, who has faced criticism for ignoring workers’ conditions. “We are making cultural institutions, which are open for the people.”