During a recent reception at the midtown-Manhattan office of COOKFOX Architects, celebrating the firm’s completion of the Neeson Cripps Academy— a 40,000-square-foot secondary school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia—partner Richard Cook described visiting that city’s Stung Meanchey landfill in 2008. At the time, he saw children, many of them abandoned by their parents, roaming the sea of festering trash in this 100-acre facility—now closed, but located near the site of the new school—looking for scraps to sell. “Some piece of me was left there that day,” he said.

The Cambodian genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979 left a legacy of poverty (the landfill scavenging being just one example) and ruptured families so extensive that it can still be felt and seen today. “The impact will go on for generations,” says Cook, whose ties to the country are personal and professional. He and his wife adopted twin Cambodian boys in 2002, and COOKFOX designed the Friends Center for the Angkor Hospital for Children, Cambodia’s leading pediatric-care facility, which was completed in 2008.