Wednesday 7 May 2025
11:30—12:20 Construction tour

Thursday 8 May 2025
13:00—14:30 Forum Hong Kong’s Public Architectures
14:45—16:15 Forum Tropicality and Development
16:30—18:00 Forum Archiving of Architecture and Urbanism

This representation of Hong Kong in the 2025 Biennale Architettura in Venice wishes to respond to the call for “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective” by highlighting the “collective intelligens” of the public infrastructures, shaped in the metropolis’ formative post-war decades, and showcase their climatically-responsive tropical modernism already anticipating the Anthropocene turn. Remarkable in their realizations of the ordinary architectures that have been fundamental to Hong Kong’s global aspirations—from the co-operative housings and multifunctional market-library-sports public buildings to the composite and modernist industrial buildings—and designed by the likes of Chung Wah-Nan, Wong & Ouyang, Ng Chun Man and Dennis Lau, P&T, the Public Works Department and architects indigenous to the territory, these structures are until-now little documented, analysed nor shared internationally. Already starting to be replaced by rapidly-changing demand-sophistication and depleting in face of the proliferation of sealed curtain walls, those that remain of these everyday types will one day become the city’s sole “future heritages.” This exhibition thus wishes to highlight to the world and to Hong Kong, these overlooked representatives of the city’s paradigm-shifting era, when the intelligens for collective conceptions are realized in spite of density and economic priorities.
With the premise of returning to uncover and catalogue this representative recent past, in the way urban archaeologists discover the civilizational cosmology through material artefacts, the exhibition transplants these findings to the Campo della Tana site across from the Arsenale, which was once a manufacturing site of industrial scale in a pre-modern world.

Curators
Fai AU, Ying ZHOU
Sunnie S.Y. LAU

Opening hours
11am—7pm
from 10.05—28.09
10am—6pm
from 29.09—23.11

Disclaimer: The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region provides funding support to the project only, and does not otherwise take part in the project. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials/events (or by members of the project team) are those of the project organisers only and do not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau, the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency, the CreateSmart Initiative Secretariat or the CreateSmart Initiative Vetting Committee.