Architecture: Urban Plan: Hong Kong goes for bust in rebuild for West Kowloon

Architectural Record via AGC's email newsletter for the construction industry (Nov2,2k10) reports on a massive urban redevel- opment planned for Hong Kong.  It's expected that the West Kowloon Cultural District will take more than 5 years to build, starting in 2k15:

With the recent unveiling of three competing master plans for the colossal West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD), Hong Kong finds itself at a watershed moment—one that will not only shape a prominent waterfront site, but also help define the city’s place in the ever-changing firmament of global cultural destinations.

The $2.8-billion publicly funded project will be Asia’s largest cultural complex and is part of Hong Kong’s drive to become “Asia’s World City.” Its scale and ambition—40 hectares of prime real estate (including 23 hectares of open space, 264,200 square meters of cultural facilities, and 422,800 square meters of commercial property)—are daunting. Construction is slated to begin in 2015 and continue in phases until 2020 or later.

Sitting on reclaimed waterfront land left vacant for more than 13 years, WKCD has a checkered history of grand hopes and disappointments. In 2004, Foster + Partners won a developer-led bid competition with a scheme that placed a gigantic glass canopy over the site. But the project was abandoned after loud criticism of the competition process and the architectural design. Eventually, the government set up an independent WKCD Authority, which relaunched the project in 2008 and commissioned three master-plan consultant teams—guided by Foster + Partners, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, and Rocco Design Architects—to compete for the job. Their schemes were unveiled in August, and the winner is expected to be announced in early 2011.

The scale of the development, altho vast, will not displace the larger urban organism that the whole of Hong Kong constitutes, with its diversity of universities, businesses, and churches. And a municipal government accountable to the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China.

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-- Archibald DerDash