Public Lecture Talk 3
We attend the public lecture talk yesterday that organised by the PAM DLS COMMITTEE. Betty Ng is a Registered Architect in the Netherlands, a RIBA (UK) Chartered Architect and an Associate Member of the AIA (USA). Betty holds a Master of Architecture Post Graduate Degree from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Architecture Professional Degree from Cornell University, with a concentration on Architecture Theory and Visual Studies. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
COLLECTIVE
Established in 2015 in Hong Kong by Betty Ng, with Juan Minguez, Katja Lam and Ying Zhou, the COLLECTIVE has previously worked closely with various international practices including Pritzker Prize laureates Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, at Massimiliano Fuksas, Frechilla & López-Peláez Arquitectos, SO-IL, MADA spam and at Hong Kong local practices including Aedas and RMJM etc on Architecture, Urban Design and Interior projects worldwide. The studio operates as a Design Consultancy, practicing in Academia, Scenography, Exhibition & Installation Design, Experiential Art, Branding, Graphic Design, Product Design, Interactive Design and Cultural Analysis.
TEAM
Building on convergence and a ‘collective’ of diverse merits, they engage clients with wide spectrum of design specificities, challenging the status quo of the architecture discipline. COLLECTIVE is a team of architects with an international background from Hong Kong, China, Europe and the United States. Their projects experiences reach those in the Europe Union, United Kingdom, Russia, North America, China, South East Asia, Australia, Africa and the Middle East.
COLLECTIVE is globally oriented and strongly rooted in Asia.
INTERIOR DESIGN
A complete gutting of a 50 year olds apartment in the mid-levels of Hong Kong from decorative extravagance to modest necessity for a family of 5. As the request of the clients, the material used was minimalised to few choices – wood, tiles and palates. The colour also fixed to white, grey and somethings that close to nature.
BAUHAUS MUSEUM, DESSAU, GERMANY
A competition that collective participate to design a museum. First, she explained that the site is basically inside the park, so the intention of the design is based on few key points. The museum is very complicated building, so the very primary step to do is organised the programs, to have a better and deeper understanding. Besides, the building is completely transparent, design with marble wall that is green, and before doing anything, the team did a very far research on Bahau, on the collection they have, from the size to the medium.
“It is the curse of the Bauhaus that every single piece of its collection appears to be a beauty on its own. Too many of its items were captivated as prisoners in storage, being denied their purpose as a tiny building module of knowledge on everyday life.”
OPEN FIELD: Museum is knowledge, to access knowledge we need to allow exploration.
EXHIBITION FIELD: To present the complete work we need a complete view.
LANDSCAPE FIELD: Museum is public, it is a living chamber.
LOGISTICS FIELD: Museum is work, it is not merely a showcase and the consumption of end products.
CULTURAL FIELD: Museum spreads culture, it should not contain but be infectious.
PLATFORM 2016, ART BASEL HONG KONG- PAVILION DESIGN
The Open Platform design for AAA engages the site of the rather non-descript convention center—surrounded with grey terrazzo tiles and the chrome underside of the escalator. The form of the pavilion responds to the site constraint of being under the escalator. The wide door that opens during the public programs faces the entrance to Art Basel’s main hall, and during busy times visitors can sit on its wide perch, taking respite from the surrounding bustle or listening to the conversations inside the Open Platform itself.
EXTERIOR: The use of hard reflective materials intend to dematerialize the pavilion in the bland environment, with a twist of the interiors, offering a change of tactility with soft foam.
INTERIOR: Inside the pavilion, a high-density foam specifically designed by COLLECTIVE serves both the acoustically-absorbing interior lining of the pavilion as well as seating cubes for the pavilion’s participants. From the distance the foam seems to resemble the terrazzo and marble surfaces already used in the site context of the convention center; on closer encounter, the tactility of the foam is a surprising relish for the users, its softness offering a refuge from the commotions of the surrounding art fair.
COLLECTIVE’s design for this year’s Asia Art Archive Open Platform pavilion has created a space for focused and ongoing dialogues, bringing together thinkers and practitioners from all corners of the globe on the occasion of Art Basel HK. The pavilion enclosure, visually open, insulates from the commotion that would be taking place in the highly trafficked main corridor with 70,000 visitors this year. The blurring of boundaries, between inside and outside, provides both the needed focus for discussions on the inside and a visual continuity that offers reflection and engagement to the public on the outside.
So to sum up, what I had learnt today is as an architecture we don’t work for others and we don’t try to compare to others. It is lucky for people to meet the team /colleagues that totally inspired us. The most important thing are the people that surround us is the way that drive you forward or go further.
Betty said ‘That does not mean being nice, we do a lot of argument, we debate all the time, but there’s no bad feeling because we are all doing for better things.”
Betty end the talk with some thought and suggestions throughout the carrier.
Betty goes on the talk with a quick introduction about her history and the architecture life that she been through throughout the years. She worked and collaborated with different experts in different country. She been to Italy, New York, Basel, Mexico, Paris, and back to Hong Kong.
There are some interesting and fascinating projects she involved – such as Oma Milstein Hall Ithaca, Herzog and De Meuron, private church in Culiacan, and La Samaritan. These really enlighten her life that being an architecture because as she said, ‘you just need to keep do your work because the work speaks for yourself, the more you do, the more you get from others’