There is a really useful project that will go a long way in poverty alleviation and uplift the masses of poor cambodians.

i'm totally against this mercification of the KR era, all they want is to monetize history and making big bucks from tourism.

the problem is not the genocide or the mass killings but the root causes that led to the KR take over and the application of their radical policies.

the uniqueness of the KR era is nowhere else in the world such radical policies have been applied before.
this is the reason anyone interested in social engineering should study the KR era in detail.

building a tourist attraction out of this, i think it's offensive towards all the people who died in vain.
long crowds of fat sweaty tourists eating ice cream and instant noodles while taking a disinterested look at what is basically a museum, disgusting.

the message should focus on the disastrous results of the collectivized economy, and the de facto slavery conditions of the people living inside the Democratic Kampuchea.

communism = slavery

capitalism = soft slavery, but still slavery.

as for the architecture of this "thing" ... i truely hate it, just as i hate most of Hadid's works.
it's soulless, has nothing to do with cambodia at all, claiming it reconnects with Angkor is total bollocks.

it looks good if you like modern architecture but that's all, it just doesn't fit with a genocide museum.
take a look at her other creation the Warsava jews museum, it looks like an airport, horrible to say the least.

in her defence, business is business and she must be laughing all the way to bank.
here she is :

it's a sign of the times.

decadence, fin de siecle, whatever ....

thanks god their creations are not designed to last long.

UPDATE
The Khmer Rouge Survivor Who Recruited the World’s Most Famous Architect
The Sleuk Rith Institute, designed by the late Zaha Hadid, will offer a different view of memory and justice.
by Amos Zeeberg May 11, 2021
[Edited]

When Youk Chhang started writing letters to Zaha Hadid, it seemed like a quixotic mission. Chhang was beseeching the world’s most celebrated architect to help him build a genocide museum and research center in a small, wounded country. Eleven years later, books full of Dame Hadid’s designs for the center rest in his Phnom Pehn office, like precious secrets. Chhang has made significant strides in his quest, though the most important step remains.

The fact that Chhang made it to this point—that he even is alive—is a triumph. Like many other Cambodians from his generation, he suffered through horrors during the Khmer Rouge regime: He was tortured for picking mushrooms, and watched as his pregnant sister was cut open and killed under the suspicion that she had stolen rice. The teenager escaped to the Thai border in 1982, as fighting continued, then to the Philippines, and eventually the United States. He finally returned to Cambodia in 1992, where he worked as a UN election observer as the nation began to recover from over 20 years of genocide, brutality, and war.

In 1995, Chhang became the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, or DC-Cam. In his time there, the nonprofit group dedicated to remembrance and reconciliation has GPS-mapped 20,000 mass graves, interviewed 10,000 victims and perpetrators, and collected more than a million documents about the genocide. DC-Cam’s work provided evidence for Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunals and helped Cambodia acknowledge the trauma it suffered through.

DC-Cam also created plans for a genocide center, dubbed the Sleuk Rith Institute, that would combine a museum, policy center, and school. The effort is as much about the future as the past. “It should be a place to heal, a place to commemorate. A beautiful place to look forward. We will turn a horrible past into a better future,” Chhang says. He wanted to break from the usual pattern of big genocide memorials around the world: depressing, heavy, and overwhelmingly male, both in terms of their sensibilities and who conceived them.


Chhang long dreamed of approaching Hadid to design Sleuk Rith, which means “the power of leaves,” referring to religious texts written on palm leaves, many of which were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. Hadid had a record of making celebrated modern buildings with inventive, dramatic curves, and Chhang saw that as a way to break away from the sharp, masculine angles and doleful sensibility of many museums related to acts of genocide around the world. Hadid was born and raised in Iraq, and Chhang thought might help her understand Cambodia’s situation, he says.

DC-Cam is now trying to turn the striking plans into a real place. Raising money for construction is a central need, but it is one that Chhang reframes. “It’s not a question of cost. It’s a question of the principle of engagement. We want it to be for victims and survivors. They [developers] want it to be a business.” Chhang says that the developers he’s negotiating with want to put Sleuk Rith on a small property, but Chhang insists that it needs about 15 acres, so it has a peaceful environment. “I think it needs a landscape. For them a landscape is a waste of villas.”
Full article: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/h ... chitecture