Rem,
Very excited by the HK Design Week. Obviously, I’m interested in formulation of the most effective team to facilitate this or any project that is at cross point of social ambition, public alignment, economic accumulation and lastly management endurance. It seems that societies that are sophisticated fail to achieve all of them at once. It is a test if HK is real sophisticated. But I am afraid this test is a painful dilemma: if it fails, HK is truly sophisticated, if it succeeds, HK is not sophisticated.
Campaign for a conglomeration of culture facilities seems to bear dubiety. Not only because Dubai has killed this phenomenon by making the biggest of this kind at all times, not only because Hong Kong has had a few of this kind, but also because of its disadvantageous location not mentioning it incompatibility to and blockage by the almost completed project called ARCH.
Above all of these, the traditional sense of cultural facility, marked by their huge belly, fair skin, bare circumstance, free posture, and rare uses does not fit Hong Kong’s urban value. As much we understand Hong Kong’s anxiety to advance its cultural profile and urgency to boost its art market, a transplant of a cultural lump is not the kind of creativity which will fundamentally break away from Hong Kong’s stereotypical image to the outside world/isn’t this what the site represents?/ forget about culture and art, let's get to the basis of Hong Kong’s creativity, which in my view, resides in the very notion of amphibian and hybrid. It is the creativity of interface and dichotomy. It is not the culture and art as we have come to known and bored with, but that can be produced and reproduced.
Therefore, new paradigms must be envisioned. Firstly, it is hybrid between housing and culture. They make symbiotic relation and proximation between art and living in orders as art living, living art and -l-a-l-a-l-a- so on and so forth. Secondly, the site should be traded with a few areas with high density, to resolve their deadlock situation and enable critical regeneration projects. Consequently, the site will be made, not much different from the ARCH project, into high value mix use commercial developments. The higher the commercial value it creates, the more central areas it will replace, the higher public/cultural values it will promise. Since the first seems to be an architectural solution, and I take a liberty to sketch and photoshop imageries to provoke more thoughts. I run into Rocco, last month and mumbling how easily this can turn into a formula for desastor. This is my quick remedy, maybe worse formula!?

Can we plan a city? The fact that every time we build a city under so called master plan, we screwed the city. Aside from a temporary match between money, population, production and maybe a little bit of political vision/ambition, every plan is expired as it is made and approved. No wonder Chinese call “Gui Hua”, Chinese translation of planning, ghost marks, also “Gui Hua” in Chinese. A city can only be curated, not planned, I am afraid, because curation brings different values at one time, or same value in different times.

This is a life cycle of mutation from urban expiration to regeneration, in which public reserved land, PRL, plays an exchange role and 20 years are life span, with landscape that are also temporary.

Besides the "dumpling" or "shao mai" strategy, meaning Housing wrapping culture, this is the second strategy n which public owned land will be put in a cycle to allow urban expiration and enable regeneration. Public reserve land should be located on the West Kowloon site, all the numbered urban expiring parts should add up the size of the PRL. 

It is to my surprise that I saw an canopy in hk which resembles almost exactly what we have offered to Shenzhen, Nanshan project.