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The Conspicuous And The Camouflaged - Ecotourism Complex in Stanley, Hongkong.

Part 1 Project 2003
Wan Kwok Yiu
James Butler
University of Hong Kong | China
Ecotourism is more than appreciation of nature but also the intrinsic culture of a locality. A sustainable strategy resuscitating the vanished reminiscence of a traditional fishing village. A spiral cohering traces of human, nature and culture.
Ecotourism centre conspicuously emulating organic origin of nature, rejuvenating the land-water threshold antithetical to homogenous interface. A canopy, stemming from the ground spanning into the water, minimizes footprints; enclosing a vast fluid volume where fourth-dimensional spaces abstract and walls, structures sublime. By the influx of water into glass-walls of different curvatures and of the refractive indices of various materials, light, shadows, mirage, reflections and refractions collages.
Resort camouflaged in nature - amalgamation of architecture, heritage and landscape - as a temporal extrapolation and backdrop accentuating the glory of the heritage. Manipulation of ramps/walls reiterates experience of traversing through resort as proliferation of ethereal and corporeal sensation. Rooms with reciprocal plan and section blur the boundary between architecture and landscape.
As a whole, this complex is a delicate conglomeration of scale mediating the vast and the intimate, which provokes a deeper emotion, encountering an eternal nature reaching apex of poetics and eternity.

Wan Kwok Yiu
James Butler


Vincent graduated with First-Class Honours and numerous design awards. I knew him for 2years, and was impressed by his motivation and unchecked energies probing into the true meaning of architecture. Being a perfectionist, a searcher of ideas and a keen learner, he established a self-awareness in the way he learnt, demonstrated by a critical and sensitive mind. He is bold and likes to challenge my views and engages me in intellectual debates on the essence of architecture. Often, such dialect discourse was conducted on the works by contemporary architects.
The Ecotourism Complex is situated on a beach in the urban-countryside threshold of HongKong. His delicate handling of various site forces and skilful manipulation of fitting the architecture into a complicated and controversial site with revered heritages and rare natural resources, with his immense richness of ideas and tectonics, bred a euphemized yet enigmatic resort camouflaged in nature.
Vincent is a lover of abstractism in architecture. In this project, one could discover entanglement in his abstract and imaginative concepts elegantly visualized by computer graphics. Being an adept in it, he experiments with complexities and contradiction in abstract forms and spaces in the ecotourism centre. His obsession in the investigation into light-glass-water-reflections brought architecture into another dimension.
Undoubtedly Vincent's project demonstrated his attempts in the search for an architectural design paradigm that challenges the spiritual mind of the beholder.

Tutor(s)

2003
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