Gal-Vents
Commissioner: Swire Properties
Location: Taikoo Gardens, Hong Kong
Status: Completed September 2024
Photography: miriamandtom | Martin Cheung
The Gal-Vents is an artistic cladding system that was designed specifically to surround four individual concrete ventilation shafts in Taikoo Place.
Located within the garden-scape, M&T’s desire was to create structured, yet organic forms that would sit in harmony with the architecture, trees and plants yet be strong objects on their own.
The technical challenges of this project were numerous and needed to be respected and creatively designed around.
Underneath the artistic cladding exterior lies an undesired mass of concrete that provides essential mechanical needs for the site. Any cladding system needed to sit within a highly restricted cladding zone depth, work around tight site conditions and could only be created from an extremely limited choice of materials due to government regulations.
These restrictions lead to be creation of an arrangement of vertical ribs. The rhythm and changing angles of these ribs break down the large mass of the concrete structure, working around the geometric constraints onsite and respecting the required airflow porosity.
This also led to two key innovations on the project.
The first is the development of the zinc coating process which created natural randomised ripples across the surface of the ribs – transforming a propriety building material, GMS, into something unique, surprising and beautiful. The second innovation is the structural system that supports the sculptural cladding which hangs off the concrete vent shaft structure and uses no mechanical fixings back to the concrete.
As a result the Gal-Vents stand proud within the gardens as interesting volumes that function mechanically and artistically, both reflecting and absorbing their surroundings and becoming key features in their own right.
