As well as the archive, five intersecting volumes will incorporate a museum, research center, graduate school, and library, encouraging new generations of Cambodians to learn lessons from their country’s fraught past. Surrounding the complex, reflecting pools and a landscaped park will frame the building and offer further spaces for quiet contemplation.
While the five towers nod to the extraordinary forms of Angkor Wat, their twisting timber columns are more evocative of the sprawling roots that have all but consumed parts of Ta Prohm’s ancient walls. Comparisons with the base of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Centre Towers are well founded, but the timber texture lends a warmer, softer glow to Hadid’s incarnation.