HONG KONG’S CENTRAL WATERFRONT Evolving a Language for the design of urban public areas THE BRIEF Hong Kong’s Central Waterfront brief asks for a creative integration of the Hong Kong harbor, seen as the gateway to Asia’s World City and the city fabric with its iconic buildings and sky line. It aims at developing a new public domain that will combine public uses and events and is well connected and integrated with the city fabric. KEY CHALLENGE The competition presents the key challenge of evolving a design language that has to bridge and accommodate apparent dichotomies in the four scales of urban systems, namely, scales of nature, scales of human purpose, scales of infrastructure and scales of technology. For this we need a language for the design of the central waterfront that provides flexible adaptive infrastructures that can bridge or negotiate these dichotomies and can allow for continued transformation within these evolving systems. The waterfront's physical design will emerge as resultant of these mediated strategies and respond, adapt or transform over time. FRAMEWORK The framework for creating such a design language rests on three envisaged out comes namely: A Harmonization of multiple scales and dichotomies in urban systems. B Particularization of urban spaces and evolution through community participation C Seamless integration through space-time and connectivity DESIGN LANGUAGE The design language is a set of protocols that can enable us to think of the whole, while engaging with unique. To achieve this, the interacting systems are broken into functional design units. There are three broad functional design units: DESIGN UNITS A - ACTIVATOR SYSTEM B - BINDER SYSTEM C - CONNECTOR SYSTEM The ABC of Design Language Design language is a set of protocols that can enable us to think of the whole, while engaging with the unique. To achieve this, the interacting systems are broken into functional design units. There are three broad functional design units: A. Activity Triggers: Triggers are infrastructure nodes that act as generators of community interactions and activity bowls. Activators trigger the landscape to become multiple event hubs and encourage mixing of diverse programs within a seamless landscape .It will allow dynamic and diverse programs to arise out of a confluence of programs, circulations and community interactions. Four types of activity spaces are triggered based on the level of subtlety of human actions: i. Intimate spaces and quiets generated by shading devices and tree clusters ii. Small group spaces for activities like Tai-chi, sea-walks, jogging, e-networked greens generated by e-cafes, eateries and digital screens iii. Public plazas for shoppers, tourists and transit groups with activities like Art plazas, leisure and recreation hubs, weekend bazaar, festival zones generated by amenity boxes with public amenities and tourist information. iv. Large Civic and performance spaces along the digital media wall and civic and historic cores. B. Binders The harmonization of intersecting systems and scales of use are critical for binding and integrating the new waterfront public space with the city fabric. This is done through scaffoldings holding the city fabric together. There are seven core dichotomies emerging out of the scales of four key interacting systems, namely the scales of the natural systems, scales of technology, scales of infrastructure, and scales of human purpose. Binders evolve as a resultant of these seven interactions. There are four types of binders envisaged for the Central waterfront namely: i. Tree Fingers They are defined tree lines along roads connecting the ridge seen in the background of the harbor through the connecting open space structure right up to the water front, at once creating a network of greens and physically and visually binding the new to existing natural infrastructure of Hong Kong. The green fingers humanize the technological landscape of the urban fabric and scale down spaces for pedestrian use. It also provides clusters of greens and quiets and the green network will encourage habitat diversity and opportunities to integrate natural drainage systems within these corridors. ii. Promontories They are 8m high and cantilevered ribbons that emerge from pedestrian and sky walks connecting the city to the water front. Strategically located with stunning views of the ‘sea-scape’ they serve as binders between sky-bus stops and infrastructure corridor and the framing views of the sky, water, and greens. iii. Mosaic Dips Mosaic dips are Plazas at transport hubs, near promontories. Envisaged as designed by artists, these vibrantly colored dips connect and bind the infrastructure corridor to the areas of human activities, gently negotiating the levels between the roads and the water front grade. iv. Ground Scraper with Media wall This binder houses the bus station and pedestrian walks at lower levels, Mediatheque with the digital screen punctured by sky bus corridor and commercial spaces on the upper floor of this seven storey bldg. It binds all these diverse dimensions while acting as a program activator on its digital façade, seamlessly negotiating multiple dichotomies. C. Connectors: Connectors are linkages that help multiple user groups to navigate and negotiate the seamless landscape connecting activity hubs, event spaces, quiets generated by the Activity triggers and the binder system. They include Pedestrian walks, Bicycle networks, Sky-bus corridor, Activity track, health loops, and Leisure loops There are three interlocking connector paths interacting with pathways of drainage and other natural systems and infrastructure paths whose purpose is to: i. Physically link separate areas and territories created by activated programs to create a seamless landscape. ii. Define perimeters of activity bowls iii. Provide narrative structures to allow different space–time experiences of the landscape. The aim of the design of the Central Waterfront is to create a seamless poetic landscape that reaffirms the relationship of the body with the landscape through a diverse range of individual and collective experiences. Though structured on a rigorous framework, the functional design units become drivers of a new language that can mediate across the rational, experiential, natural and artificial systems.