Herzog & de Meuron’s thoughtful intervention to the historic fabric of a former police station transforms a walled-off compound into a nexus of cultural exchange.

With the ever-competing diversity of building typologies and programmes in dense urban environments, big cities often struggle with balancing the pressure of space optimisation and preservation of history. In Hong Kong, one of the densest cities in the world, the new Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts achieves the balance by adaptively reusing a collection of historic buildings while activating a historic compound with careful interventions that enable art programmes and social spaces.

When Herzog & de Meuron faced the task of revitalising the former Central Police Station, the Central Magistracy and the Victoria Prison on Hong Kong island, the design team wanted to not only preserve the history of the compound but also to create an oasis of openness and public recreation in the heart of an urban jungle. The approach demanded a careful and non-intrusive strategy to create a new public space dedicated to cultural programming via revitalisation of the existing courtyards and buildings and careful addition of new spaces conducive to contemporary art exhibitions and cultural programming.

The resulting intervention allows two new distinct building volumes to float gently above the historic buildings as careful insertions into the existing fabric of the site. Cantilevering above the adjacent structures, the new volumes maximise the buildable floor area while retaining the existing generous courtyards and circulation spaces for gathering and activity.

The new buildings are clad with a cast aluminium façade system that draws references from the scale and proportion of the existing granite blocks of the revetment wall surrounding the site. The buildings deliberately set themselves apart from the existing collection of historical buildings and create a symbiotic relationship between the old and the new. The façade, apart from drawing references from its context, is also a response to Hong Kong’s subtropical climate, addressing sun shading and rain protection. Its textural quality reduces the reflectivity and glare during the daytime.

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A city of many paradoxes—the old and the new, the traditional and the contemporary, the minimal and the over-the-top—Tokyo is a metropolis unlike any other, with an ever-evolving cultural and urban character that gives it an almost enigmatic substance. At once fiercely protective of its cultural heritage but forward-thinking in pushing the creative boundaries in architecture and design, Tokyo has cultivated an identity characterized by its acceptance and adaptability of various–sometimes opposing–influences. Inarguably, it is Tokyo’s heterogeneous identity that has been so attractive to some of today’s top tastemakers in architecture and design, transforming the city in the most unexpected and exciting ways in the process.

The mammoth retail industry of the city has elevated shopping in Tokyo to a status of high art, with prominent high-end fashion labels and local boutiques alike hiring architects like Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas and Tadao Ando to design their flagship stores. With Herzog & de Meuron recently completing Italian high fashion brand Miu Miu’s deliberately demure store in the Aoyama neighborhood, brand-name architects are continuing to one-up each other with retail experiences that are hard to forget. Within the MOMOM store by Moriyuki Ochiai Architects, designed for a company running its own dairy farm, the interior features organic shapes and energetic patterns to communicate the vitality and dynamism of its products, while Nendo’s revamp of the Seibu Shibuya department store evokes images of mobile amusement parks, with whimsically patterned surfaces, circus tent-like sales areas, and playful textures setting a lively tone for the store’s “Key to Style” and “Hat Cloud” fashion floors.

Creative adaptation of existing spaces for new purposes has created a fertile ground for architectural experimentation and innovation within Tokyo’s tightly knit urban fabric. Kengo Kuma & Associates’ Tetchan yakitori bar features a tapestry of tangled colored cables and recycled acrylic by-products, alongside some manga wall illustrations, to create an other-worldly environment. Meanwhile, Schemata Architects’ renovation of an old steel building into a studio and office for renowned artist Hiroko Takahashi transforms the imperfections of an old factory into unique and unexpected workspaces. Other recently completed projects include another renovation of a former storage building into Blue Bottle Coffee roastery and a café by Schemata Architects, a warehouse-club-cum-office with floating walls and pillars by Ryuichi Sasaki/Sasaki Architecture and La Kagu—a former warehouse converted into a lifestyle store, café and public space—by Kengo Kuma & Associates.

Looking into the future, Tokyo’s architecture and design scene shows no signs of scaling back or toning down its unique sense of exploration and self-evaluation. With the 2020 Olympic Games looming on the horizon, mega-projects like the new Olympic stadium by Kengo Kuma & Associates and the Olympic Aquatics Centre by Yamashita Sekkei continue to attract worldwide attention. Jumping further ahead, Kohn Pederson Fox Associates’ recently unveiled proposal titled Next Tokyo envisions a high density, mega-city of the future, built on resilient infrastructure and adaptable to climate change, offering solutions for low-lying coastal areas around Tokyo Bay.