Kan Chan, Landale Street looking towards Queen's Road East with external circulation core at far end - Palazzo Mora -

Procuring Collective Memory: Institute for Transient
The project is an extrapolation of a retroactive hypothesis for the unstated project that spans through 200 years: a journey of continuous discovery and appropriation to fabricate a unique cultural logic that is specific to our city – Hong Kong.
It aims to question how the specific locality can be sustained with social progress.
In 1841, Captain Elliot granted an indemnity of Free Trade to Hong Kong; the port has forever opened up a window to the gigantic motherland.
From a place of oblivion to an international trading port, the history of Hong Kong was founded in a state of the ephemeral and self-gov- erned: the momentum of assimilation, re-production, and speculation: a permanent impermanence.
The visionary plan by Sir Patrick Abercrombie in 1948 is the only plan Hong Kong ever had in history. Wanchai, literally the Cove, was never part of the vision.
Nevertheless, since the city was found in 1845, it has undergone a series of projects to invent a vision that give rise to its uniqueness: restraint of governance for freedom to cultivate, urban upgrade for growth and prog- ress, and allotment for sharing the city.
Paradoxically, it is the lack of an overall vision that allows a culture not imposed by autocracy nor governed by absolute power, but subcon- sciously cultivated by the major population: a state of anarchy charac- terized by the transient.
The cultivation demands autonomy: any displacement of local dwellers would only result in extirpation of the local identity. Predestinated to be anarchic and transient, the city was haunted by its history.
The divorce from utilitarianism and alignment with free markets has fur- ther condemned the city to a flight of perpetual progress.
Scarcity in land also implies an either-or approach in urban development, threatening the eradication of the traces.
The culture is now expiring: the 50-year land tenure is ending and the rest in 2047 when the city returns to the motherland.
The never-ending progress exorcises nostalgia; the city demands an opu- lent facade for growth.
It is only until the recent incidents of Lee Tung Street and Wanchai Market that the culture was given a name: collective memory.
Yet, it was named after it had gone, and gone forever. A posthumous appellation.
In a genuine sense, this naming was about things and activities that had happened in the place that provokes memory.
Architecture and buildings were only a backdrop to the happenings.
Therefore, the project is a procurement of the uniqueness that gives the identity to Wanchai: the culture of transience, a retroactive manifestation of a culture that has been cultivated since the city was found in 1843, an institute constituted by a large public without prejudice and generated by everyone who shared the city.
The project is based on a fundamental concept: a city shared by everyone.