K11 Art and Culture Center / SO-IL
+ 17
- Surface:
10000 m²
Year:
2017
Photos: Kevin Mack, Chris Provoost
Text description provided by the architects. Designed at the same time as construction began on the Victoria Dockside, the museum’s architecture is driven by the challenges of its unique environment: it rests atop a K11 Art Mall and under a dozen floors of luxury waterfront homes. The museum combines the top two floors of the stage, originally designed for retail and further food and drink, with a generous rooftop sculpture terrace with the beautiful Hong Kong skyline as a backdrop.
While glass is considered a fairly conventional building material, it plays an important role in our unconventional response to the project context: a museum located in a mixed environment and adjacent to commercial spaces.
Museums are generally closed volumes that avoid involvement in their often hyper-urban environment. Our design simply embraces transparency to engage the museum in its commercialized urban space.
The floating museum is surrounded by a facade of 475 glass tubes, each nine meters high and one meter in diameter, and weighing two tons. From the street, the sculptural monumentality and visual distortion of the glass create an abstraction that sets the museum apart from its densely built urban context. Up close, the glass makes its content clear to visitors and introduces playful arrays of reflection and light. The outsized transparency offers visitors peace of mind when they come down from the hustle and bustle.
