West Kowloon Cultural District Authority has appointed Herzog & de Meuron and TFP Farrells to design a new museum for visual culture on the edge of a reclaimed, 14-hectare park in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. Focusing on 20th and 21st century art, design, architecture and moving image, M+ will be one of the first projects to be completed in the West Kowloon Cultural District, and a key venue in creating interdisciplinary exchange between the visual arts and the performing arts in Asia.
Perhaps the design’s most unique and defining element will be the way in which it “literally anchors itself to the ground.” In order to create a “radical space” for installations and performances, Herzog & de Meuron has designed the museum to connect directly to the Airport Express via an underground tunnel in an effort to challenge artists and curators with an unprecedented exhibition space.
Jacques Herzog stated: “For art to enter into the life of a city like Hong Kong it has to come from below, from its own foundations. Our M+ Project does exactly that, by literally emerging from the city's underground."
Beyond the subterranean, avant-garde exhibition space, the 60,000 square meter museum will host a resource center, an educational facility, an auditorium, multi-story interior courtyards and meeting spaces, restaurants, bars, a sky garden and more. At one particular moment while wandering through the musuem, visitors will stumble upon a broad diagonal opening in the floor that affords a view into the excavated “Found Space” below and the vertical building and open skies above via a large circular cut-out in the ceiling.
Sun-shading horizontal louvers will be integrated into the façade along with an LED lighting system that will activate it with a display of art works selected by curators or created especially for M+.
Completion is schedule for 2017.
