SPACES TO INSPIRE
CITY VISIONS

The precisely composed settings and atmospheres in the Austin Gallery present urban development projects in the West Kowloon Cultural District as an imaginative, highly aspirational process. The visual and spatial narrative features an oval art gallery-like space, leading to a long room where a ‘ribbon’ of high-gloss wood panels stand on a serpentine sandstone floor pattern. The pale wall opposite is softly and rhythmically lit. These walls – one solid, one insubstantial – are metaphors for a city facing the sea. And they set up a gracefully narrowing perspective for clients, which concludes with a relaxing bar area.

A video wall projects dreamy, moving images in a space characterised by powerful graphic effects – white-light grids visually interlocking with the ceiling and walls of a corridor which conclude with a single artwork at each end. Every feature of the Austin Gallery is designed to prompt an ambience of upscale quality, personal ambition, and sense of style. And this is particularly obvious in the massive project model, which appears to float theatrically above its dark plinth, surrounded by the showroom’s gleaming, mirror-steel ribbed walls.