Prada Frames Makes Asia Debut at Hong Kong’s M+
HONG KONG — The first installment of this year’s Prada Frames, a symposium conceived by Milan and Rotterdam, Netherlands-based design studio Formafantasma and backed by Prada to explore the complex relationship between the natural environment and design, kicked off Tuesday at M+, Hong Kong’s global museum of visual culture. The event coincided with the physical return of Art Basel Hong Kong this week.
Under the theme “Materials in Flux,” the symposium started with a lecture by famed architect Jacques Herzog, cofounder of Herzog & de Meuron, the mastermind behind the creation of M+ within the West Kowloon Cultural District, which also hosts the Xiqu Centre and Hong Kong Palace Museum.
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Herzog offered a retrospective take on projects that were inspired by and respect the natural surroundings, like the award-winning but never realized proposal to transform the Marktplatz in Basel, Switzerland. As one of the duo’s first projects, it saw him and Pierre de Meuron offering different ways to remind the locals that there used to be a river running across the market square.
“In those early days in the ’70s, postmodernism and deconstructive are all things that we didn’t like at all. We hated them and we needed to find our own approach to what architecture could be to create a kind of path on which we could enter this world of architecture,” said Herzog of the Marktplatz project.
Their response, which can be seen through multiple projects, is to design and build based on what’s on-site, such as the Ricola Herb Center in Switzerland, whose facades were made with the soil and gravel found on the location. The same approach can be seen in later projects such as Tate Modern, the Serpentine Pavilion in 2011, and M+.
Commenting on the design of M+, Herzog said that given a train tunnel was passing under the location at the time, he utilized the geometric shapes and concrete walls of the tunnel as a blueprint for the design of the museum.
During a Q&A session after the lecture with Suhanya Raffel, museum director at M+, and Yokoyama Ikko, lead curator of design and architecture at M+, Herzog further explained that the reason he disliked postmodernism was “more unconscious,” because “to not like what surrounds you as a young person is quite common. But the question is, how can you find out about this and how can you find a way which is natural and which opens up a path? You can also dislike something and then you’re getting more and more complicated and you get lost.
“And again, I think it’s a very different situation for people who will begin now. To some degree, you have to kill your ancestors to do something. As you know, postmodernism and deconstructivism were recipes leading to disasters. All the people who worked on that got stuck in their own idiosyncratic prison,” he added.
His advice to young creatives today is that “you should try to avoid form if it’s not necessary because especially in architecture, you can see there is an effort of the architect to create and I always somehow dislike this effort to create. The effort to look before you do something, is also I think, ecologically more interesting.”
Keri Ryan, lead curator of learning and interpretation at M+, said the event was “particularly special” because it marked the first time for the museum to welcome its creator, as it opened to the public during the pandemic in November 2021. More than 3 million people have visited the museum so far.
M+’s Raffel added that the return of Art Basel Hong Kong helped “all of the partners to see the completion of this museum from their eyes, which is filled with art, programs and audiences. I think it’s when the people occupy this building, that you really understand the genius of it.”
Raffel also said that this collaboration with Prada “demonstrates how the museum can be the container for this stimulation, for this discussion, for what is actually a very serious and important conversation around environment, art, architecture and design.”
On the second day of Prada Frames in Hong Kong, panel discussions were hosted around the theme of sea preservation and material circularity.
The first panel, titled “Sea state,” saw multidisciplinary artist Lisa Reihana; Christian J. Lange, Rocker-Lange Architects founder and leader of the Robotic Fabrication Lab at Hong Kong University; Singaporean contemporary artist Charles Lim Yi Yong, and CT Low, an expert in the study and prevention of global sea levels rising, sharing their respective approaches to the ocean, be it cultural, scientific, romantic or statistical.
Later in the evening, the second panel welcomed three sets of guests.
The first one featured Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Formafantasma and contemporary photographer Edward Burtynsky, who has been documenting global industrial landscapes and what human force has done to the environment for more than 40 years, discussing ways to extend the lifespan of all sorts of materials that, in an ideal world, can be legally, ethically and systematically extracted from manmade wastes, and how to improve the lives of those who worked in the waste recycling industry in China, South East Asia and Africa.
The latter two talks then showcased artists and architects from Hong Kong and Mainland China and how they utilized existing and affordable materials in urban regeneration.
Otto Ng and Yip Chun Hang of LAAB Architects first presented how they have been preserving the city’s legacy by involving its last remaining operating sawmill, Chi Kee, to rework timbers recycled from a discontinued local ferry dock into a small batch of furniture for a cafe, and to help campaign to preserve the sawmill’s warehouse in the face of demolition for new development. Marisa Yiu, cofounder and executive director of Design Trust, showcased creative works from designers under its mentorship programs, as well as its efforts to revitalize pockets of neighborhoods in Hong Kong by adding smartly designed play areas and green spaces.
To close the event, Chinese architect Yung Ho Chang shared how he uses the most common and cheap materials found in China — plastics, bricks and timbers — to design clever, energy- and labor-efficient, and beautiful buildings across the globe, such as the gray brick-clad Maison de la Chine, a new residential facility at the historic Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, as well as a series of restored historical buildings with improved internal timber structure on the banks of the Yangtze River in Chongqing that used to belong to Anderson & Co., a Swedish trading house.
“Occupying an old structure is one of the best ways to save energy and to cut down pollution than making any kind of new buildings,” Chang said.
The second leg of the 2023 edition of Prada Frames is scheduled in tandem with Salone del Mobile and Design Week. It will be held at a still-undisclosed location in Milan on April 17 to 19 with a different roster of speakers and lecturers compared to the Hong Kong leg.
They include Tim Ingold, Elizabeth Povinelli, Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Sophie Chao, Veena Sahajwalla, and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
The symposium, which was introduced last year during Salone del Mobile and Design Week in June, is defined by a “scientific, educational and didactic approach,” according to Prada. Last year it centered on the interconnections between the forest ecosystems and the wood industry and how design and science can spur change.
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