Complicity
A tower model for the Hong Kong exhibition at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale
For the 2018 Biennale, whose theme was Freespace, Hong Kong's exhibition asked architects to each design a tower on the same white frame and base. More than a hundred of them stood together in Venice, a small city of towers standing in for Hong Kong's density.
Our tower is built from nothing but grids. Thin white strips are stacked floor after floor inside the frame. Near the top and bottom the grids are open and far apart; toward the middle they multiply, tighten and shift, until the tower seems to hold a white cloud at its center.
Grids
In elevation, the floors are spaced like a gradient: wide at the ends, close together at the middle. In three dimensions, the overlapping grids build up into a dense oval that hangs inside the frame.
Looking down through every layer at once, the grids add up to a single fine lattice.
The tower is 360 mm square and 2,160 mm tall: a 1,800 mm frame on a 360 mm base, both painted wood and supplied by the curators. Inside, the grids are 1 mm white styrene strips, mounted to the frame with white plexiglass. The small plans at right show how the grid changes from one floor to the next.
Model
Up close, the grids never quite line up. Each layer is slightly offset from the one below, so the openings blur into each other.
In Venice
The exhibition, organized by the Hong Kong Institute of Architects Biennale Foundation and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and led by chief curator Wang Weijen, ran from May to November 2018 as a collateral event of the Biennale. (Exhibition press release)