Hong-Kong is probably the most overpopulated city in the world, with a population density of 30 000 inhabitants/Km2, a staggering number! Living conditions are hard in this concrete, steel and glass urban jungle, that has been cut away from nature a long time ago, with pollution reaching truly alarming levels. Its Municipal Administration is bent on turning this situation around, and, as such, it has ordered an urban intervention project from Vincent Callebaut's architecture firm, looking to regenerating the sea front. The basic idea of this proposal is to bring back Nature, by creating self-suficient spaces that will allow the development of more biodiversity and produce more energy than the amount it will spend.
The project is ambitious and the intervention is radical. Basically it proposes a riverbed mesh that is extended and infiltrates through the entire downtown, as if it were a living organism. This circuit incorporates every means of transportation and, at the same time, creates real living cells, such as lakes, marinas and other biologic spaces. It's also within these cells that culture and leisure equipments will be located at, such as museums, theatres, etc. The new "topography" is not only aimed at the city's inhabitants, but also hopes to create an environment that can be occupied by various local fauna and flora species. In a nutshell, a new ecosystem.
However the riverbed mesh is not an isolated infrastructure. It works together with a group of hight towers, which the project's creator calls "techno-organic" and that look more like trees or rhizomes, because of the way they are multiplied and ramified. These towers, which are to be used as houses, offices, for services or leisure, are covered with an organic surface, able to grow luxurious vegetation and transform them, literally, into "hanging gardens". Living architecture.
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