Change Agent

Herzog & de Meuron’s mutable M+ museum sees the light in Hong Kong.

- Catherine Shaw

The new M+ building’s deceptively simple, inverted T-shape shows that visual art museums don’t always have to be extravagant, dramatic edifices as expressive as the artwork inside them. The Hong Kong structure’s refreshingly nuanced, material-led and site-specific austerity belies the museum’s content – which is dedicated to 20th- and 21st-century visual culture – and ambition.

The museum is the work of the Pritzker Prize-winning Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architects known for London’s Tate Modern, New York’s Parrish Art Museum and the recent transformation of Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun historic quarter. The practice has collaborated with locals TFP Farrells and Arup HK on the project, which is located on reclaimed land in the new, 40-hectare West Kowloon Cultural District.