K11 / SO-IL Center for Art and Culture

Description of the text provided by the architects. The museum’s architecture, designed at the same time as construction began on Victoria Dockside Pier, is based on the challenges of its unique setting: it rests on top of a K11 Art Mall and below a dozen floors of luxurious residences in front. of the sea. The museum combines the two upper floors of the podium, originally designed for retail and other food and drink, with a generous rooftop sculpture terrace featuring the magnificent Hong Kong skyline as a backdrop.

Although 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 adjacent to commercial spaces.

Museums are usually closed volumes that avoid compromising with their often hyperurban environment. Our design simply adopts transparency to involve the museum within its commercial space of the city.

The floating museum is surrounded by a façade of 475 glass tubes, each nine meters high and one meter in diameter, weighing two tons. From the street, the sculptural monumentality and visual distortion of the glass create an abstraction that distinguishes the museum from its densely urban context. Up close, the glass makes its contents clear to visitors and introduces playful matrices of reflection and light. The large transparency gives visitors a respite when they arrive from the hustle and bustle below.