2007 – HK Cascade Gardens _ Hong-Kong

 

 
Program Hong Kong Central Waterfront
Place Hong kong (HK Central / Wai Chan)
Team Eric Cassar, Julien Bertrand, Zully Sibille
Owners Designing Hong kong competition – First Audience Award (9490 votes (largest number of votes) – average note 4,7/5 (best score) – project 014 on the competition website )

General principles Project is to create Hong Kong cascade gardens that will delimit public places and identify Hong Kong as did Babylon hanged gardens in another time.

 

A cascade garden is made off a building with a huge vegetal cover (various typologies of gardens).
From the garden, users take benefits of a piece of landscape with a full sea view. Sample of garden reveals infinity of visions, smell… Each garden is different with special vegetation (a wheat field, a rainforest, a mangrove, a vineyard, a beach…). Those different kinds of environment offer to walkers different landscapes where they can go sometimes to relax, meet, have fun or…
Cascade gardens delimit three public places and one piece of forest, both opened to the sea.
From the natural ground (cascade gardens base) walkers or drivers coming from town discover sea view through rifts. Rifts create unique sea frame and special entrance of light. Buildings are opened to the town. They animates waterfront in an environment mixing nature, sea view, town connexions… Programmes are various : culture, restaurants, café, entertainment, sport …

Hong Kong cascade gardens come from a contemporary vision, it is a network project. It is made of several landscapes (gardens with different species and typologies) which can be seen as a whole in the distance. It designs Hong Kong ‘sea line’ which discusses with Hong Kong Skyline and identifies Hong Kong Bay. Cascade gardens animate waterfront with its various colours and natural spaces. They give sea view for everybody in plenty of different atmospheres. They permit a multiplication of configurations, creating superposition of several planes of perception in every dimension. It alternates solid and void, light and shadows. Conceived as a network, project is easy to construct and to develop; it can adapt itself to new needs and fit to town necessities. The thick vegetal cover of the gardens permits to keep and reuse the water. It acts as a retarding in case of stormy shower. It brings a thermal and hydraulic mass to the building underneath.

When people enter and practice those spaces, architecture surprises them, mixing various environments. Architecture and landscape architecture create a variety of different spaces, different sensations, point of view and impress (depending if you are inside, under or over gardens, in public place, promenade, forest…).