Could you inhabit it? Eye Line commends Yat Chi Tse for his renders of a high-tech agricultural industry, a socio-economic model for villages in Hong Kong
Commended, Practitioner
Yat Chi Tse
Hong Kong Architectural Services Department, Hong Kong
The last 100 years have seen the mass exodus of rural village populations to Hong Kong Island, and Yat Chi Tse proposes to remedy this with a high-tech way of reinvigorating the countryside to reverse what seems a dramatic decline. ‘The work proposes to revitalise rural areas, conserve nature and promote cultural heritage through establishment of a high-tech agriculture industry; to construct The Jaap Wo Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology to formulate an architectural prototype and a socio-economic model for the other villages in Hong Kong.’
The judges found the quality of rendering compelling. ‘It seems scaleless – working out whether you could inhabit it gives the images a very enigmatic quality,’ thought Wigglesworth. Ramstad felt it looked like ‘a strange Polaroid of intensive Dutch farming methods.’ All were struck by the manner in which the structure seemed to intervene benignly on the landscape. ‘I like the work’s hyper-real aspects,’ noted Chou.
Eye Line award winning drawings from this and previous years