Open Call

Hengqin was planning to expand its cooperation with Macao to jointly develop logistics, tourism, finance, leisure, and cross-border e-commerce industries.  With the upcoming proposal, Hengqin is destined to be adopted into a different way of life tha leads to an alienation from its own past.

As modern insertions embedded into Hengqin can be seen as impermanent, caught in a shorter life cycle of constant change, the city can be viewed as placing strain on its collected historical anchors in favour of an architecture which responds to only its immediate economic and environmental needs, dismantles, and creates again.

As these object forms nested in the permutations of city’s field conditions, the city is capable of unifying diverse and seemingly disparate elements while still respecting the identity of each. The swampy chaos of the “sea” with its inhabitants: parks, pop-up events, spill outs, and bits of small urbanization, collectively reside in the infrastructure, namely streets, roads and rail.

It is with Art as it is with Architecture, exists Horror Vacui, an intense and irrational fear of empty, wide open spaces.  Seemingly made up of nothingness, of pure space, often alluded to but never defined, closer inspection reveals a collection of objects and urban scenarios which give identity to moments of place within the circulating swampy chaos space of the city.

What is to buffer this speeding devlopment of Hengqin, which was once frozen in time?  How will the changes be obscured, evolved and accepted? How might architects evolve this morphogenesis?