Hong Kong at Venice Biennale 2023: sustainable, humane architecture to the fore as designers explore future of city at a crossroads

The 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale spotlights processes shaping the built environment, and Hong Kong’s contributions highlight the city’s transformation

The development of rural areas and the chance it gives to reshape the city are explored, as is the community-centric use of space in its public housing estates

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The Hong Kong Pavilion at the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture greets visitors with bamboo canopies to illustrate the possibilities of sustainable architecture. “Transformative Hong Kong”, Hong Kong’s offering at this year’s event, focuses on using humane design to shape the city’s future. Photo: Michele Agostinis

Christopher DeWolf

Published: 7:15am, 1 Jun 2023Updated: 12:56pm, 9 Feb 2024

Corrected [12:54pm, 9 Feb, 2024]

[12:54pm, 9 Feb, 2024]
An earlier version of this story called Jeffrey Cheng an architect. However, while he graduated in architecture from the University of Waterloo in Canada and worked for a decade for global architecture firms, he is not a registered architect in Hong Kong, or a member of an overseas body or institute of architects, and thus may not be called an architect according to the Architects Registration Ordinance.

When Scottish-Ghanaian architect Lesley Lokko took the helm of the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture, the penny dropped. “An architecture exhibition is both a moment and a process,” she wrote in her introductory note to the biennale.

The same can be said about the built environment. It can be captured, recorded and studied at any given moment, but its evolution is constant: understanding it requires understanding the processes that shape it.

“Laboratory of the Future” is Lokko’s theme for this edition of the biennale, which ends on November 26, and the hundreds of exhibitors taking part are looking into each cog of the vast machine that is propelling society into uncertain times ahead.

“We wanted our exhibitors to focus on the design process and not only the outcome,” says architect Yutaka Yano.

He is one of three curators of Hong Kong’s contribution to the architecture biennale, Transformative Hong Kong, which brings together 10 installations from architects, scholars, engineers and photographers – along with subway train operator the MTR Corporation – that provide some insight into how Hong Kong is changing, and what kind of city we can expect in the years to come.

Yano and co-curators Hendrik Tieben, head of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s (CUHK) School of Architecture, and Sarah Lee, Yano’s partner in architecture firm Sky Yutaka, argue that Hong Kong is at a pivotal point that will define it for years to come.

(from left) Sarah Lee, Hendrik Tieben and Yutaka Yano, Hong Kong’s curatorial team at the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture.