LANDART +
LANDSCAPE +
INTERIOR +
ARCHITECTURE
GARDEN OF THE INTIMATE IMMENSE
Location:
Year:
Type:
Stage:
Role:
Hong Kong, SAR, China
2013
Cancer support
Completed
Architecture Concept development with Gehry Partners; Landscape Architect with Urbis
Limited HK; Interior Design with Ronald Lui Partners HK.
Photography © Frank Fischbeck
Project Awards:
Merit Award at the HK Landscape Architects Design Award 2014
Maggie’s Centre provides a space for practical and emotional support for people with cancer, their families and friends. The design for this first Maggies outside of the UK was conceived with a lecture by Lily Jencks to Frank Gehry and his team on the design of historic Chinese gardens.
The rooms are organized around a central hub which provides the public space of the building, a sittingroom and kitchen, with the more private consulting rooms moving off the main space and surrounded on each side by the garden. In this way it seems as if the rooms are moving out into the garden, and the garden is moving into the building.
Photography © Frank Fischbeck
The traditional Chinese scholars garden uses water, rocks and planting to represent the wider landscape, recreating mountains, lakes or seas and woodlands in the intimate garden setting. We have used these traditional ideas in new ways, maintaining the same elements, but playfully reordering them to respond to the building.
This early integration of landscape form and building has created a complex relationship between the man-made forms and naturalistic garden setting. These intimate gardens represent the macrocosm of the universe within the microcosm of a landscape, bringing an awareness of man’s place in nature.
Photography © Frank Fischbeck
We create an idea of a larger garden by designing each element to wrap around corners, extend beyond view, and be reflected and repeated so as the garden is experienced it seems bigger than it is, while maintaining its intimate qualities.
Photography © Frank Fischbeck
Lily Jencks Studio: Lily Jencks