Keloid of Garden Hill
The University of Hong Kong, Bsc 3 2019
ARCASIA Students’ Architectural Design Competition 2019 Bronze Award
“Buildings replace the land. That is architecture’s original sin. The memories that we built up around that particular place also disappear. In their place is a structure that is new, if only for a moment, and that aspires to have a perfect form, function and appearance. In all cases, a building is one thing above all else: not the land.” Garden Hill was heavily equipped with different scales of infrastructure to preserve it from landslides and serve as a water reservoir, inspiring how infrastructure founded itself into the earth and evolved in rapid urbanisation. Eventually, these led to the design of an underground museum meandering between heritage nodes.
Nowadays, Garden Hill is anchored by three heritage spots: a magistracy at the foot of the hill, a service reservoir hidden near the top of the hill and a sightseeing park at the peak. By examining the slope of the hill and iterating through different spans, we tied up the anchors with a meandering ramp which allows visitors to unveil the geological history of the hill. To propose the structure of this architecture, we used the Gallo- Roman Museum in Lyon and many other retaining structures examples as references. As a result, the underground space was supported by a series of barrel walls on the back and slanted columns along the spine. Meanwhile, the aboveground park was retained by crib walls and hydroseeding, creating a contrast in experience for the visitors.
