Founding Partner, Herzog & de Meuron Basel Ltd.
M+ museum preview (Herzog & de Meuron) in Hong Kong WKCD
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The Swiss architecture agency Herzog & de Meuron won the realization of the "M + Museum", a new visual art museum in Hong Kong scheduled for completion in late 2017 on the site of West Kowloon.
Pending the opening of the highly anticipated construction, this film is presented as part of an exhibition of the project, explaining the design process.
Thanks to a series of plans and models that help to understand the structure of the building, and a series of interviews, this documentary delivers a clear presentation of the project and successfully creates an enticing...
About Pierre De meuron
At a 2014 event at the Swiss Pavilion during the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, Pierre de Meuron participated in a discussion on preservation alongside Jacques Herzog, Chris Dercon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. De Meuron described renovation as involving "the sheer impossibility to bring time back," noting that in historic rooms originally built with gas lighting, it is not possible to fully recreate the past. He stated that decisions in preservation involve destroying some layers to reveal others, such as choosing to expose early Renaissance features over later styles, and that the goal is to create a good space for contemporary use rather than adhering to a single ideology. De Meuron also contrasted this approach with what he described as an American tendency to treat history as something concrete that must be simulated. He referenced the ecological perspective of Joseph Beuys, a co-founder of the Green Party, suggesting that preservation contains an ecological dimension. De Meuron remarked that the shared approach with Rem Koolhaas on the House of the Kunst project involves a tension between preserving value and not blocking paths for the future, emphasizing that the past should be understood in social rather than formal terms.
Transcript (14 segments)
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Pierre De Meuron0:08
It really means museum and more or less museum and beyond the museum we know. We define it as a museum not only of art but of visual culture, meaning what we call art, what we call design, architecture, moving image. So the wide sort of visual culture field.
It was difficult not to be attracted by M+. It has so many ingredients that make it interesting. It certainly could become the most important institution for visual arts, visual communication, visual performance, and artists' work or crossover kind of work in Asia, and not only in Asia, a totally new institution. So the building would need to really be thoughtful, not just a piece of architecture that is especially flashy or especially whatever.
I mean, like on every competition, we test a lot of things until we kind of settle in on the right kind of idea. What we always found a bit challenging on this project from the beginning was basically the empty site. Just a bit over 20 years ago, there was no site. It's actually part of the Victoria Harbor and then the area reclaimed.
So, the land is somehow innocent. The land is virgin. You know, it's like when you are in front of a project and start to think about it and where are you? You need something to grasp. And so for us, it was very important to find something, you know, where we could get a start. Here we did not really have this possibility until we found this airport express line which was sold to us as a major obstacle of the site. And rather than making it a huge problem or rather than just ignoring it, because that's what they recommended, just pour a 3-meter thick concrete plate on top of it and just pretend it's not there, we did the opposite. That was the only thing we found on the site and we made it basically the starting point of the entire design. By digging it out, we could have a more vertical experience, which makes the experience also more multi-dimensional.
They did the same a little bit like they did in Tate Modern when they instead of trying to get away from the huge turbine hall actually embraced it and made it a centerpiece.
The building kind of exists of these four main parts. The first one which is really where we kind of started the whole process is the found space. The second element will be the platform above this which is like your public plaza if you want. We have multiple entrances on multiple levels. Basically whether you come from the Artist Square, whether you come from the park or whether you come from the water, this is where you will meet. It's almost like the introduction into the whole museum. And above that you have the podium level which houses the more conventional gallery. So it's all on one floor. So it's very, very easy to navigate through these. And the fourth one is the vertical slab which is a very thin tower building. You've got your in the harbor.
Well, we have lots of workshops, one every three or four weeks, and we're about halfway through the process that leads to scheme design, which is the point at which you know where all the rooms are. You know where the structure is, but you haven't done a lot of the detailed work on exactly what rooms look like, how their floors are finished. That comes later. So it's a very intense period where we also as the museum team have to be clear on what we want more precisely.
It was a successful competition because they were not only looking for a design but they were also looking for a design team, which is a huge difference. Each workshop has a different topic. Today's topic basically was the display spaces. So we really work together with the M+ team on figuring out the layout of the display spaces, different qualities, the sequences, the openings, the floor, the ceiling, proportions, locations, adaptability.
We even discussed materials, windows into the landscape, skylights, no skylights, quite a detailed walk through the entire podium level. I personally always am fond of museums that don't feel like a temple or a cathedral, you know, so people have to go into a big huge grand building to worship the art. I think art is for people to interact with and art is for people to live with. So I hope parts of the museum can be very public friendly, even to the members of the general public who are not a typical museum goer.
Conventional museums. You walk in the front door, you get some information, you walk around a lot of galleries, you come out the other end, maybe have a coffee, and you leave. We wanted there to be places in the museum where you could see the life of the museum going on, that part of the museum that is generally hidden to the public. Under the ground there's a link across between the two buildings. What the conservation and storage building does is it provides a big amount of space for storing the collection and for working on it. In this building there'll be a big window that looks into something exactly like a gallery space for the public but it's a private space where we can assemble works of art. The public can watch while that process is going on.
I think it will work well against the backdrop with the ICC complex and then we have the harbor right in front and then the Hong Kong Island skyline. We were really asking for a building that on one hand really could take its location, take its place there and be sort of gutsy enough in competition with all the others. It was important that it was a building that actually announced that it was a museum and not an office building or a residential building, but it really had that sense of being a museum building.
The building itself offers another potential through that slab that is the office administration, workshop, restaurant slab, in that it's a very innocent office building you see through. It's very thin, but it's also like a screen that can be used by artists and informed by artists as a display space to project artistic messages, images, text, whatever, and to infuse them into the skyline of Hong Kong, which is a commercial one. We're still in the early stage, but we're testing out the spacing of these LED lights, how that would look from varying distances. We're also thinking of using photovoltaics to provide the power for this LED screen.
A museum is really a meeting place between content and its audiences. Of course, one of the most important tools we have in this meeting is the building. A lot of things that we will be presenting ask for a building, ask for spaces that architecture and design and so forth should be seen together with the art without a sense of hierarchy, but rather to embrace the dialogue between the different parts. Also, I think there's a symbolic value in the building that is important to sort of maintain and keep. I don't think a museum without a building can really last over a long period of time. It needs that symbolic sort of presence.
But it's not the same as the museum. This building we're designing, we will continue to happen outside the building both in cyberspace in a digital form and of course in a physical space out in the West Kowloon Cultural District and hopefully out in the city of Hong Kong as well.