HONG KONG, CULTURAL DISTRICT INTERNATIONALER WETTBEWERB, 2001 MIT: KUNSTAKADEMIE MÜNCHEN, ARCHITEKTURKLASSE KONTEXT

After passing the incredible generosity of the Harbour-Garden, the visitor enters another world, as he moves into the lifts in the main entrance. It's not just visiting a theatre or an exhibition - it's a journey, that surely will include the confrontation with unexpected activities and people searching for a completely different event - it's an urban experience. The different programmatic strips overlay each other. All of them are connected to the access-strip and the multipurpose »open space«, that can be used in itself, but also in addition to the defined activities nearby. If you imagine the absence of the separating walls, all visitors sit in a single theatre, move on a common platform. The oblique part contains theatres, cinemas, halls. It's roof-terrace is orientated on Lantau-Island and the evening-sun. The fold between the ramp and the horizontal platform answers for a single decision, a single statement and constitutes the capacity of the platform to work as the super-sign for culture in Hong Kong. The horizontal platform contains all activities of exhibition, information and entertainment, that use horizontal planes. This part also owns a roof terrace, composed by the programmatic marks, offering a diversity of surfaces and materials, with an open view over the Hongkong harbour. The reclamation area itself remains far off free from building as a spacious public garden by the harbour with its unrestricted accessibility and terrific panoramic views to the harbour, the skyline and Lantau-Island. The platform and the garden become a unique public space, a public site in every sense of the word. The site stands for itself. It corresponds to the Hong Kong scale. It is integrated in the urban surrounding, but it does not answer to something, it just coexists. It tries to enrich the city, not to complete it - a new question instead of an concluding answer. The Cultural Platform is an 1,4 km long, 100 metres wide and 15 to 20 metres high addition of programmatic strips, forming together one single trace. It comes up as a ramp from the water on the west side of Kowloon reclamation and passes into a horizontal platform, that floats 50 metres above the reclamation area, imposed only on a single rest construction.