The West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD), a 40-hectare site on Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour, is envisioned to become a cultural gateway to the Pearl River Delta due to its strategic location and integrated world-class arts, cultural, entertainment and commercial district. It will include provisions for performing arts venues and visual arts venues. It will be a cultural hub for attracting and nurturing talents, international cultural exchange and co-operation.

In 2003-04, as a member of Foster+ Partners' team, we worked along with two leading Hong Kong developers, completed a detailed plan, complete with financial projections for the proposed visual arts venues.

In 2006, the Hong Kong government decided to formulate an alternative route to taking forward the WKCD project. WE were asked back to join the Financial Advisor team for the District. The major part of the work involved the exploration of public-private partnership options for the visual arts venues, including operating cost scenarios that compared publicly operated museums with those operated under a public-private partnership arrangement.

In 2009, our team was engaged to prepare the Development Plan. Our role has been to provide programming, operational and business planning input on the visual arts components: M+, a cultural institution with museum functions on visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, its related off-site collection storage facility, and a self-financed Exhibition Centre. Themes include Design, Moving Image, Popular Culture, and Visual Arts, extending even to an outdoor cinema. Our role also included advising 2 of the 3 new architectural Concept Plan teams and contributing to Foster + Partners’ master plan for the district. With a capital cost of HKD 21.6 billion, the WKCD is designed to grow organically, with its final phase scheduled in 2045.

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