Building off decades of experience in West Kowloon, Farrells worked in partnership with Herzog & de Meuron and Arup Hong Kong to deliver the M+ Museum for Visual Culture, the West Kowloon Cultural District’s flagship museum for contemporary visual culture. Set apart by the diversity of its world-class collection, which embraces a wide range of art, design, architecture, and film, M+ will serve as a cultural hub in Asia that rivals New York’s and London’s finest and will foster interdisciplinary exchanges between the visual and performing arts.
The design for the 75,785 m² museum building, selected unanimously by an international jury panel in 2013, incorporates a wide range of display spaces to suit the museum’s varied collection. The slim vertical tower houses research space, curatorial offices, and public restaurants behind a façade that incorporates an LED lighting system serving as a massive display screen. The horizontal slab is home to a diverse and flexible collection of galleries surrounding an internal central plaza. It floats above a subterranean “Found Space” – a raw, industrial display area excavated next to the existing railway tunnels that run between Farrells’ designed Kowloon Station and the Farrells’ designed Kowloon Ventilation Building.