Design Trialogues Launch with Inaugural Keynote Speaker Rem Koolhaas

Design Trialogues Launch: Design Trust Decade Talks 2024 took place on Saturday September 14^th 2024 at JC Cube of Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, in celebration of 10^th anniversary of Design Trust and Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design since 2007, and past and future collaborations between DESIGN TRUST FUTURES Studio and Project on the City. Marisa Yiu (Co-founder, Lead Curator, Executive Director of Design Trust) welcomed former Design Trust Feature Grant recipient and Pritzker Architecture Prize recipient Rem Koolhaas (Founder of OMA & Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design, Harvard GSD) as the Inaugural Design Trialogues Keynote Speaker to launch the new programme Design Trialogues, together with his renowned "Project on the City" team and Harvard Graduate School of Design back to the Greater Bay Area region.

Conceptualized by Marisa Yiu, Design Trialogues is a new conceptual framework exploring how stakeholders from public to private sector and NGOs can convene productively on cultural exchange and expansive knowledge sharing through multi-language open conversations. Curated by Marisa Yiu (Co-Founder, Lead Curator/ Executive Director) and Zheng Zhou (Head of Programmes & Associate Curator), Design Trialogues Launch: Design Trust Decade Talks 2024 featured the Inaugural Design Trialogues Panel with Rem Koolhaas (Founder of OMA & Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design, Harvard GSD) together with Marisa Yiu (Co-founder, Lead Curator, Executive Director of Design Trust) and Sarah M. Whiting (Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design), followed by a discussion with respondents Christine Loh, Doreen Heng Liu, Donald Choi and Stephan Petermann. Design Trust Decade Talks brought together former student members of Rem Koolhaas from 1990s: Kate Orff, Nancy Lin, Stephanie Smith, Bernard Chang, Mihai Craciun, Yuyang Liu from the world-renowned 1996 Project on the City team and their seminal publication on the Pearl River Delta region, who are all now leading designers and scholars, to converse with Design Trust grant recipients architects, designers and scholars including Adonian Chan, Bob Pang & Charles Lai, Paul Tse & Evelyn Ting, Elaine Yan Ling Ng, Ashley Scott Kelly and Zhang Lei to collectively discuss and respond to the topical issues and envisioning the future  role of design from Hong Kong to the Greater Bay Area and internationally.

Marisa Yiu (Co-founder, Lead Curator, Executive Director of Design Trust) said: “I have long been intrigued by different formats of sharing and conversations, whether in an intimate salon style setting, to formal symposiums, each content format challenges sharing with precision and conjures type of conversations, debates to dialogue unveiling new opportunities. I am thrilled to shape a new conceptual framework called “Design Trialogues” exploring how stakeholders from public to private sector and NGOs can convene productively on cultural exchange and expansive knowledge sharing through multi-language open conversations. “Trialogue” is a composite word derived from “tri,” meaning three, and “dialogue,” meaning conversation. I am curious to see how this “Tri” involves tripartite sectors of how public, private, general public NGOs can convene, or a format of trilingual language tests limits of cultural sharing and expansive knowledge sharing through culture.”

The Inaugural Design Trialogues Keynote Speaker Rem Koolhaas (Founder of OMA & Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design, Harvard GSD) shared the background of the Project on the City: Great Leap Forward in 1996, and also explained the reason behind the latest plan to revisit the Greater Bay Area and understand the regional development. He said: “We called ‘City of Exacerbated Difference’- maybe what we had seen was a situation where a single entity was not defined by a new coherence and overall plan, or overall identity, but on the contrary, based on competing identities and conflicts. Hong Kong and Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, and Macao formed something new, but it was not too consistent adaptation of the elements circling between themselves. One of the really interesting reasons to go 30 years later and to see again, how this phenomenon necessarily developed is whether this is still a plausible model, or whether we are actually witnessing also in terms of the terminology from ‘Delta’ to ‘Bay’ more an effort at coherence.”

The keynote panel also welcomed Sarah M. Whiting (Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design) who shared on the pedagogy and research development at Harvard GSD. Design Trialogues invited respondents Christine Loh, Doreen Heng Liu, Donald Choi and Stephan Petermann for an engaging panel discussion with Rem Koolhaas moderated by Marisa Yiu, further unpacking the past, present and future from the Pearl River Delta region to the Greater Bay Area. More on Design Trialogues Launch and Rem Koolhaas’ keynote speech to share shortly.