“Victoria Harbour as a Tapestry of Festive Tales” invites the public to rediscover the harbour through new perspectives, encouraging deeper connections with the water itself. Traditionally, public spaces along Victoria Harbour have been designed for ground-based activities, keeping people at the water’s edge rather than in direct contact with it. In the 1950s, swimming sheds once offered spaces for the community to dip into the harbour, but today, access to the water is limited, leaving little opportunity for free and playful engagement.
This proposal envisions twelve floating islands that reclaim the harbour as a civic space, transforming it into a living tapestry of collective experiences. Like threads woven together, each island represents a unique narrative, inspired by the history, culture, and shared memories of its location. These floating platforms offer diverse activities and characters, inviting visitors to step onto the water and immerse themselves in a dynamic landscape where past and present flow together.
Sze Wing Chan is a registered architect with her Master’s degree in Architecture, Urbanism, and Building Sciences from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 2019, following her undergraduate studies in Hong Kong. She has practised internationally across Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Japan, working on a wide range of cultural projects and public spaces. Chan specialises in material-driven architecture, with key contributions to the award-winning works by Studio Ossidiana (Prix de Rome Architecture 2018), among others, and several public space renovations in Hong Kong. Currently practising at Kengo Kuma & Associates in Japan, she was awarded the DFA Young Design Talent Award (2024). Deeply passionate about creating spatial atmospheres through experimental materiality, Chan seeks to craft architecture rooted in a tactile, sensory approach.
Ka Ho Cheuk is a registered architect with extensive experience in architectural design across Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Malta. His practice centres on place-making for public interiors—spatially contained environments that accommodate multiple scales and layers of public life within the city. Through spatial design, model-making, object creation, and material exploration, his work examines how public spaces can foster meaningful urban interactions.
Sze Wing Chan
Ka Ho Cheuk