Opinion | A tale of two museums: How Hong Kong’s arts hub design could have been more inclusive
- From the M+ to the Palace Museum, none of the high-profile venues in the West Kowloon Cultural District were offered up for greater participation in truly open design competitions, a missed chance to include the public and build civic pride
When working on a residential project on Stubbs Road, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry came to Hong Kong in 2005 and spoke of our city as a place with not much architecture, as most buildings resemble “products from the same cookie cutter”.
If buildings are hardware, architecture is hardware with a soul.
Hong Kong’s magical transformation from a fishing village and salt production fields to a major logistics hub and global financial centre is legendary. However, the scarcity of buildable lands forced landowners and developers to squeeze every square inch of space, churning out mainly rectilinear and indistinguishable floor plans to maximise use and efficiency.
Throughout the years, opportunities for architecture were lost, although we kept on building. Hong Kong buildings epitomise “form follows function”, but probably not in the way imagined by Louis Sullivan when he coined the phrase.
In comparison with our economic growth, Hong Kong certainly lags behind in art and cultural development. But being a financial centre does not mean there is no room for high design and culture. New York and London are two of the best examples of megacities that are also leading cultural hubs and trendsetters.
