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Tropicality and Development
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.