Zenthos is an architectural response to rebuild Hong Kong’s trust in locally farmed sea fish and to reclaim Mui Wo’s identity as a seafood town.
Zenthos is conceived in a tidalectic framework, emphasising cultural mediations, ecological rhythms and spatial interplays. A recent development responding to climate urgency, tidalectics imagines a paradigm shift to an oceanic worldview that resists static, land-based binaries. It embraces the flow of tides as a metaphor for cultural, ecological, and spatial negotiations.
Combining production and pedagogy, Zenthos offers farm-to-table experience with fish farm, testing lab, cooking school, café, and resource corner. It embraces the environment as a living system in flux, mediating land and sea. One access allows boats to moor, the other closes at tidal threshold, echoing the precarity of aquatic health contingent on water conditions.
Zenthos translates marine concepts into immersive experiences. Scrim fountains on the glazed roofs cast dynamic shadows on visitors moving in mediated Z paths, evoking the sensation of being submerged as benthos in the sea. The private program of lab is ironically glass encased to signal transparency.
