Development Team

Developer/Architect
Architectural Services Department
Hong Kong, China
www.archsd.gov.hk

Owner
Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department
Hong Kong, China
www.afcd.gov.hk

Landscape Architect
Urbis Limited
Hong Kong, China
www.urbis.com.hk

Project Data

Site Area
61 ha (151 ac)

Facilities
11,000 m2 (118,403 sf) visitors center/classroom/office

Land Uses
visitor center/museum, park/open space

Start/Completion Dates
March 2002–April 2006

Jury Statement

Having started out as a prosaic wetlands conservation initiative, the Hong Kong Wetland Park blossomed in its planning stage into an educational facility to demonstrate best practices in environmental reclamation and sustainability and also into a tourist attraction. The park has succeeded on all counts, demonstrating a sound investment of public funds.

Awards for Excellence: 2007 Winner

Hong Kong Wetland Park
Hong Kong, China

Originally envisaged as purely a conservation and ecological mitigation initiative, the concept of the Hong Kong Wetland Park was expanded to encompass a world-class tourist attraction as well as a major conservation, educational, and recreational resource. A substantial wetlands mitigation initiative has been combined with exhibition and educational facilities on the theme of sustainable development—and all of it within a context of best sustainable building practices.

The park and visitor center project combines a number of potentially conflicting objectives in order to provide a world-class tourist attraction as well as a functioning wetland and educational facility. Designed as a demonstration site for wetland reclamation and environmental sustainability, the 61-hectare (151 ac) park/visitor center focuses on indigenous plants and building materials, reused and recycled building products, and energy-efficient building systems.

The original wetlands conservation and mitigation initiative was already underway when a study commissioned by the Hong Kong Tourism Board recommended that new attractions and facilities be developed to support the tourism industry. Consequently, the Architectural Services Department of Hong Kong revised its plans for the project to include a tourism, educational, and community facility based on the theme of wetland conservation. As a result, the Hong Kong Wetland Park became a showcase of sustainability and environmental consciousness, an example of building in harmony with nature through best practices in architecture, construction, building services, and landscape design.

“Initially,” reports Andy Lewis, project team leader from the Architectural Services Department, “the brief presented us with the enormous challenge of how to impose a major tourist attraction and environmental education resource within an ecological mitigation area with no attendant loss of conservation value. I believe it is to the tremendous credit of our project team that, through a fully integrated, multidisciplinary approach, we were able to surpass this objective by producing an icon of sustainable design principles that is not only visually stunning, but also economically viable, of immense significance to the local community, and of enormous educational value. Also, it merges seamlessly with its environment.”

The Wetland Park was developed in two phases. Phase 1, which was completed in 2000 and served as a demonstration of what was to come, comprises a garden and a building that at first served as a small-scale exhibition gallery and has since been converted into a ticket office for the phase 2 visitor center. Phase 2, which opened in May 2006, comprises a visitor center with three galleries, a resource center, offices, a café, a shop, and a children’s play area; a discovery center; fixed and floating boardwalks; bird-viewing blinds; and extensive plantings, wetlands, and wildlife habitats. Walkways and a series of display gardens, exhibition ponds, and re-created habitats lead from the visitor center to the discovery center and beyond, into progressively more remote natural areas. The visitor center with its green roof is purposely hidden within the landscape; when viewed from outside the park, it appears to be a green hill.

Originally expected to attract 540,000 visitors in its first year, the HK$520 million (US$67 million) project attracted 1.2 million visitors in its first 12 months, generating HK$25 million (US$3.2 million) from admission charges and other activities. Having exceeded its economic expectations, the Wetland Park clearly represents a sound investment of public funds. In addition, the park is meeting its educational objectives, by providing conservation education activities for thousands of primary and secondary school students and teachers, as well as by hosting international conferences. Indeed, now that the park has become a tourist attraction that is on tourist guides’ lists as a must-see, the new challenge the project faces is how to manage the traffic that it has generated. The Wetland Park demonstrates the viability of a sustainable lifestyle and presents an important message about the value of sustainable development to all who visit.