QR 21/F
Level 1
Chapter 1
Intersecting Paths
Perhaps these paths have crossed before. Perhaps they begin to cross here.
Architects preserve traces of different places through personal ways of seeing: a photograph taken on a walk; the floorplan of a hotel room drawn during a stay; a harbor seen from a ferry; the joy of a festival felt beneath a temporary bamboo structure. Multiple exposures bring streets and passing figures together, while the rainy season blurs the world and drains its color.
A Hong Kong cha chaan teng offers warmth; affordable housing offers a sense of security. These scenes may seem unrelated, yet something connects them. Beauty has been close to us all along.
Each architect tells a story of their own: Gary Chang through hotel rooms; Lisa Huang through the waterfront, Jeff Tung through buildings, light and shadow. There is Taylor Leung’s East London, the sense of disappearance in Nour Shalaby’s work, Luo Wei Guo’s memories of home, Frank Leung’s celebrations and William Lim’s cha chaan teng.
They slow down and look closely. Their works remind us that memory is never fixed: it overlaps, fades and is rewritten each time we look back.
Chapter 2
Design in Practice
Where does a design begin, and what does it become?
Whatever the location or scale of a project, bringing it to life takes more than technical skill. Architects draw on what they notice around them, test their ideas and work through countless decisions to create spaces and objects that are both useful and beautiful.
Beginning with a dialogue between two Park Hyatt projects, this section presents designs that have been realised or are under construction. They range from plans for an urban district to a standard hotel room. Early ideas, sketches, studies, digital images and photographs of completed work allow us to follow each project’s development. Some records also reveal proposals being rejected, revisited and reworked before finding their final form. The extraordinary can begin with something ordinary.
Daniel Widrig’s computational design and digital fabrication, Gary Chang’s LEGO models connecting Hong Kong’s shophouses with Shanghai’s shikumen, Frank Leung’s model for Yishe at Atrium House, Simon Wong’s use of AI, AB Concept’s design review video and CCD’s drawing-review documents each reveal the persistence behind practice. Together, they show both the difficulty of putting an idea into practice and the determination to keep working until it feels right. Perhaps that is what gives good design its lasting life.
Chapter 3
The Unbuilt and the Imagined
Perhaps what remains unbuilt is even more compelling, and even more deserving of being seen.
This section brings together unbuilt designs and open-ended visions of the future. Some began as ideas quickly jotted down; others became detailed proposals but were never realised. Wang Xiao Dong’s meeting doodles sit somewhere between concentration and distraction. Before the lines settle into a design, several directions remain possible.
Other works use architecture to consider new technologies, materials and changing ways of life. Fatimah Ishmael explores surveillance, automation, consumption and withdrawal through unrealised proposals. As these systems reach further into daily life, what kinds of space will people need? In his notebook, Dae Wha Kang imagines a future London where buried rivers return to the surface, bringing the city’s possible future into contact with its hidden past. These works do not predict what will happen. Instead, they keep a line of thought open: even when a design is never built, the questions it raises remain.