Project 10, 2nd Edition Modern Construction Case Studies - Precedent: Agricultural City, Aichi, Japan designed by Kisho Kurokawa
City in Suspension: Reclaiming the Oblique in Project 10, Hong Kong
Set along the liminal edge where Hong Kong’s dense urbanity meets water, Project 10 is not merely a new design district—it is a speculative territory. Hovering between land and river, ground and sky, the project reactivates the radical spatial experiments of postwar architectural thought while proposing a visionary response to the contemporary crises of space, scale, and climate.
Rooted in the unrealized ambitions of Kisho Kurokawa’s Agricultural City and Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay Plan (1960), Project 10 positions itself as both a continuation and critique of the Metabolist movement. It draws from Kurokawa’s vision of a modular, ecologically integrated urbanism—one in which built form and natural system exist in symbiosis—and reinterprets it within the hyper-congested and environmentally fragile context of contemporary Hong Kong. Here, the metabolist logic of flexible, extensible infrastructure becomes not a utopian ideal but an urgent necessity.
The district unfolds across two interwoven levels, introducing oblique geometries that fracture the expected flatness of urban grids. This gesture pays homage to Claude Parent and Paul Virilio’s “Function of the Oblique,” where tilted planes destabilize the user’s orientation and challenge the dominance of rectilinear, functionalist space. The result is a spatial field that resists passivity—an architecture of movement, imbalance, and embodied experience.
In doing so, Project 10 becomes a laboratory for what Henri Lefebvre called lived space—a terrain of social practice, not just geometric abstraction. The circulation systems eschew Cartesian logic in favor of sensory drift; sightlines multiply; boundaries dissolve. It is a district meant to be inhabited not only physically, but psychically.
Floating just above the existing city, the district extends into the river, reclaiming liquid space as a site of architectural potential. This amphibious gesture evokes the floating urban utopias of Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon and Yona Friedman’s Spatial City—speculative, elevated worlds of flexibility, play, and perpetual becoming. These precedents, deeply critical of capitalist urbanism, envisioned the city not as a fixed entity but as a dynamic cultural medium. Project 10 does not imitate these visions; it absorbs their spirit and reconstitutes it into a form responsive to the complexities of now.
As sea levels rise and ground becomes a scarce commodity, the idea of inhabiting water is no longer abstract—it is imperative. In this sense, Project 10 aligns itself with emerging discourses of amphibious urbanism and climate-responsive design. It envisions a future city that doesn’t conquer nature but floats within it, guided by an architectural intelligence that is adaptive, porous, and resilient.
The project also resonates with Keller Easterling’s concept of active form—a design logic less concerned with fixed objects and more invested in latent systems, spatial protocols, and the negotiation of flows. In this light, Project 10 is not a static masterplan but a living framework: a scaffold for change, a field of possibilities.
While its historical references are many—Metabolism, Situationism, infrastructural urbanism—Project 10 is unmistakably of the present. It reflects a generation of designers grappling with the failure of grand plans and the reality of fragmented cities, yet still daring to imagine new forms of urban life. It is a city in suspension—between past and future, water and land, order and drift.
References
Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space.
Friedman, Yona. Architecture Mobile.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space.
Mostafavi, Mohsen, and Gareth Doherty. Ecological Urbanism.
Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City.
Virilio, Paul, and Claude Parent. The Function of the Oblique.
Wigley, Mark. Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire.
