LAND
An Institute for the Transient
Materials: Concrete, Acrylic Perspex, Plastic Sheet, Foam Board, Card Board

Size (W x L) (mm): 2000 x 2000

Team Members

Aravia Design Limited.
Ching-kan Chan

Kwokhei Ip

Bernice Lau
Paul Y. Engineering Group
Alvin Wong
The University of Hong Kong School of Professional and Continuing Education
Mona Tse-ngok Yeung

Eddie Hon-lam Chan

Casey Wang

Joseph Chan

Sebastien Saint-Jean

Slobodan Radoman

Title:
An Institute for the Transient

Materials:
Concrete, Acrylic Perspex, Plastic Sheet, Foam Board, Card Board

Size (W x L) (mm): 2000 x 2000

Synopsis:
From a place of oblivion to an international trading port, the history of Hong Kong was found in a state of ephemeral and self-governance - the momentum of assimilation, re-production, and speculation - a permanent impermanence. Paradoxically, it is the lack of an overall vision that allows a culture subconsciously cultivated by the major population and embodied in the built environment.

The cultivation demands an autonomy: any displacement of local dwellers would only result in extirpation of the local identity. Predestinated to be anarchic and transient: the city was haunted by the its history. The divorce with utilitarianism and sided with free market has further condemned the city to a flight of progress in perpetual. Scarcity in land also implies an either-or approach in urban development, threatening the eradication of the traces.

Designing museums or memorials would only destroy existing ‘group relation and contemporary reference’, rendering ‘mémoire collective’ disappeared and ‘mémoire’ ‘histoire’. In order to sustain the cultural logic of the transient and allow social progress, a program of re-organization of servant space is conceived to regenerate new space. It is a constitution by majority, an institute without prejudice and generated by public: a city shared by everyone.