EcoDesigning Hong Kong

The urban mesh of the Central Business District is surrounded by the green hills visible from the Victoria Peak in the South and by the sinuous bank of the Xi Jiang, also called the Pearl River in the North. On the horizontal stratum compressed along the curves of the levels of the precipitous relief, the city structured itself vertically through a field of more or less frayed towers of glass and steel. Hong Kong is one of the more populated territorry in the world with a density of 30 000 inhabitants/km˛. To answer to this overpopulation, the project «Urban Jungle» proposes to re-tame the nature and to widen the territory of the ultra-contemporary city.
In the heart of the South China Sea, this «perfumed harbour» will abound in an urban jungle by the renaturalisation of the urban landcape and its extension on Central Waterfront. In the framework of the long lasting development, the goal is thus to increase the real estate availability by setting up an ecologically positive strong print. This means so that the new built spaces are auto-sufficient and produce more energies and biodiversity that they consume!

Masterplan & Waterfront

The redefinition of the Central Waterfront offers us the opportunity to understand the aquatic world and to retranscribe it by liquid spaces with high fluidity. A continuous layer pierced of cells redefines thus a new ecologic substrate to the elaboration of this project. Actually, a mesh of irregular cells enables the water to infiltrate in the deepest of the existing urban fabric and its hollow teeth to the Tamar Site overriding the Tun Wo Lane. This mesh hangs to the bank of the Victoria Harbour to the bottom of the towers. By undulatory circuits ramifying and refining at its extremities, this multimodal layer integrates all the relevant modes of transport including airport rail, underground rail (MTR), ferries/fast boats, private yachts, the Central-Wanchai Bypass, various circulation roads, franchise and non-franchise buses and minibuses.
The cells overlap in alternate rows and put the visitors in the heart of a continuous open space fluctuating between open-air swimming pools, marinas, kilometres of new quais and pedestrian or bicycle promenades in the seafront, piers, swamps, lagoons of biologic purification, oceanography museums or even subaquatic operas. In front of the skyline of the Kowloon peninsula, a true cascade of aquatic and vegetable terraces like the ones of a rice terrace are layed out on this fifth façade. This new topography, without any wall, thus without any limit, is not only meant to be inhabited by the citizens of Hong Kong but is also designed to be infiltrated, crossed and printed by the numerous species of the fauna and local flora or in migration that will come to install themselves. It is thus finally a new ecosystem linked to the networks that will progressively set up embracing from East to West the piers of the Central Ferry Terminal, the IFC Tower, the Hong Kong City Hall, the Circus Plaza, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the Exhibition and Convention Center and the Wanchai Sports Ground.

The Towers Recycling The Atmosphere

Drawing their roots in the deepest of the South China Sea, a field of techno-organic towers dashes from the water towards the sky. These towers develop themselves as true trees multiplying in rhizomes. Actually, their structure grows vertically along the trunk on which many arborescent branches ramify. Around these branches a fishnet dress profiling the highly environmental façades hangs up. The regular pixels formed by this fishnet are closed on a random way by cushions of substrate and vegetable fertilizers enabling the development of a luxuriant vegetation. The spatial configuration of these ecological towers offers them a double function. The spaces called « inside » the arborescence will be dedicated to the private sphere of the housing whereas the spaces called « outside » the branches will be dedicated to the bureaucratic service sector and the leisure. This diversity of functions tends to answer to the nocturnal paralysis from which the Central Business District suffers, hollowing out at night by a new social vitality of exchanges and interconnexions !

EcoDesigning Hong Kong

Under the subtropical climate with dry winter, the arborescent towers linked together by a road and pedestrian network changes thus into true vertical gardens with strong ethnic identity. Echoing back to the art of the Chinese faience with sinusoidal curves, they contrast by their sensuality with the surrounding rigour of the back-field built in barcods. Metaphor also of the Chinese projects covered by a linen woven of green fibre, these are living architectures with processes inspired of the biology and the botany. According to the investment bank Merrill Lynch, the atmospheric pollution in Hong Kong decreases strongly the competitiveness of Hong Kong, especially in front of Singapore. The workers of Hong Kong and their families preferring leaving Hong Kong to preserve their health. To fight against the pollution, the metabolism of these new ecological towers will thus enable the city of Hong Kong to purify and simultaneously recycle the rejections of CO2 contained in the atmosphere into oxygen by photosynthesis and to produce by cogeneration (from combustible rejections) electrical energy or thermal energy to reinsufflate in the urban network.

Urban Jungle for Hong Kong

PROGRAM : Ecodesigning Hong Kong

LOCATION : Master Plan for the Central Waterfront, Central Business District

SURFACE AREA : 2.7 linear Km

PROMOTER : City of Hong Kong

TEAM : Vincent Callebaut + Arnaud Martinez + Maguy Delrieu

Other Projects / Lilypad, A Floating Ecopolis For Climate Refugees

Lilypad, a prototype of auto-sufficient amphibious city Whereas the Netherlands and the United Arabic Emirates « fatten » their beach with billion of euros to build their short-living polders and their protective dams for a decade, the project «Lilypad» deals with a tenable solution to the water rising! Actually, facing the worldwide ecological crisis, this floating Ecopolis has the double objective not only to widen sustainabely in offshore the territories of the most developed countries such as the Monaco principality but above all to grant the housing of future climatic refugees of he next submerged ultra-marine territories such as the Polynesian atolls. New biotechnological prototype of ecologic resilience dedicated to the nomadism and the urban ecology in the sea, Lilypad travels on the water line of the oceans, from the equator to the poles following the marine streams warm ascending of the Gulf Stream or cold descending of the Labrador. It is a true amphibian half aquatic and half terrestrial city, able to accommodate 50,000 inhabitants and inviting the biodiversity to develop its fauna and flora around a central lagoon of soft water collecting and purifying the rain waters.

Other Projects / Dragonfly, A Metabolic Farm for Urban Agriculture

Dragonfly concept aims for ecological self-sufficiency in New York
The latest concept design from Vincent Callebaut Architects – the Dragonfly – has been designed with the intention of easing the ever-increasing need for ecological and environmental self-sufficiency in the urban cityscape. The proposed development, designed around the Southern bank of Roosevelt Island in New York, follows a vertical farm design which, it is hoped, would cultivate food, agriculture, farming and renewable energy in an urban setting.
The unique 128 floor, 700m concept design is spread over two oblong towers and suggests building a prototype of an urban farm in which a mixed programme of housing, offices, laboratories and farming spaces are vertically laid out over several floors and cultivated by its inhabitants. The architecture of the design proposes reinventing the vertical building, so associated with the New York skyline of the 19th and 20th centuries, both structurally and functionally as well as ecologically.
The functional organisation of the design is arranged around two 600m towers, symmetrically arranged around a huge climactic greenhouse that links them, and constructed of glass and steel. This greenhouse, which defines the shape of the design, supports the load of the building and is directly inspired by the structural exoskeleton of dragonfly wings. Two inhabited rings buttress around the ‘wings,’ and along the exterior of these are solar panels, which will provide up to half the buildings electricity, with the rest being supplied by three wind machines along the vertical axes of the building.
While most would argue that the unconventional design of Dragonfly would be more suited to Dubailand than New York, the conceptual design tackles the contemporary dilemma of food production and agriculture in a city sorely lacking in the horizontal space required to do so, as well as attempting to achieve this in an ecologically sound and renewable way by merging production and consumption in the heart of the city.

Vincent Callebaut

In 2000, Vincent Callebaut, 23 years old, graduated with the Great Architecture Prize René Serrure awarding the best diploma project at the Institute Victor Horta in Brussels for its Parisian project « Metamuseum of Arts and Civilisations » Quay Branly. Then, thanks to the bursary Leonardo da Vinci attributed by the European Community, he decided to live in Paris to extend its critical thinking and its spatial inventiveness during two years of internship in agencies that fascinate him (Odile Decq Benoit Cornette Architectes Urbanistes, Massimiliano Fuksas). In 2001, he competed in box and won the Grand Architecture Prize Napoléon Godecharle of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts of Brussels awarding the best hope of the Belgian architecture with its ecological project « Elasticity, an aquatic city of 50 000 inhabitants entirely autonomous». The jury appreciated at the same time « his dynamism, his expression force and the coherence of his concept » and recognised « a personality endowed with a remarkable aptitude giving well-founded expectations of great success and able thus to contribute to the fact that reputation of Belgium becomes a truth ».In 2005, he was the finalist of the RE-New Architecture Pleasures awarding the 12 best figures of the Architecture in the French Community of Belgium. During the same year, the Edition Company Damdi of Seoul dedicated him at the age of 28 its first architecture monograph detailing the story of its awarded and exhibited projects during worldwide spontaneous proposals and international competitions. Since then, in the framework of his agency and great collaborations (Jakob+MacFarlane, Claude Vasconi, Jacques Rougerie), he militates continuously for the long lasting development of the new Ecopolis via «parasitical» strategies for an investigation architecture mixing biology to information and communication technologies >From New York to Hong Kong crossing Brussels and Paris, Vincent Callebaut proposes with determination and conviction prospective and ecological projects by insufflating locally dialogs and meetings that try to raise our questionings on the society in which we live as citizen of a global world!