The Architects of M+ Return to M+ (and BODW Too)

These days, if you walk into M+ and make your way to the Focus Gallery, you’ll see something unusual: the museum’s own architects on display. Rows of wooden vitrines contain models, drawings, samples and other traces of the design decisions behind not just M+ but also Tai Kwun and many of Herzog & de Meuron’s other projects around the region.

Herzog & de Meuron: In Focus opened on 12 September, just ahead of M+’s fifth anniversary, and it looks at the Swiss firm’s Hong Kong and mainland China through donated process material. The exhibition is designed to resemble the architects’ own archives housed inside the Kabinett in Basel, where Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron founded their practice in 1978. 

Since then, they have designed some of the world’s most spectacular museums and cultural facilities, including the Tate Modern in London (2000), the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg (2017) and the National Stadium — the so-called Bird’s Nest — which was built for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. All told, Herzog & de Meuron have worked on more than 600 projects around the world, 200 of which were oriented around arts and culture.

M+ is one of their most recent — and largest — cultural initiatives. Since it opened at the end of 2021, the museum has become impossible to ignore. Not only for its exhibitions and events; not only because of its ample public space; and not only because it occupies an extremely prominent position on the shores of Victoria Harbour. But because of one of its signature features: the giant LED screen that covers its entire harbour-facing façade.

Buildings have an afterlife

“It’s become clear that the LED façade at M+ has extended the museum’s curatorial reach beyond the building and into the city,” says Herzog & de Meuron CEO and Senior Partner Wim Walschap. “Rather than operating as a conventional billboard, this harbour-facing façade can be understood as M+’s urban-scaled gallery: a public exhibition space carrying art, moving image, and cultural messages beyond the museum. There is no longer a boundary between the museum and the city — rather, the screen allows M+ to become part of the city, with the city itself as its audience.”

Walschap was appointed CEO in May 2026, but he has been with Herzog & de Meuron since 2007. Six years later, the practice won the international competition to design M+. Walschap was the partner in charge of the museum project. Since it opened, he has had a chance to see how it has evolved, along with Herzog & de Meuron’s other Hong Kong project, Tai Kwun, which was overseen by partner Ascan Mergenthaler. Their direct involvement in these projects ended when they were completed, but that’s not the end of their story: each building has an afterlife. 

“At M+, the most interesting evolution has been the way the project’s public spaces have been claimed by the city,” says Walschap. “Beyond serving museum visitors, the building and surrounding landscape provide a framework for gathering, meeting, and relaxing, making M+ a destination for everyone. At Tai Kwun, the transformation has established a major cultural venue and civic ground within Hong Kong’s dense urban fabric. Its historic buildings, courtyards, passages and contemporary additions support both programmed and spontaneous uses. The project has become a living, essential part of the city’s landscape as well.”

What’s worth keeping

M+ was built from scratch on reclaimed land. Tai Kwun, by contrast, involved refashioning a very dense, nearly two-century-old compound into a cultural and entertainment centre, with two contemporary pavilions inserted into the historic fabric. But that wasn’t anything new for Herzog & de Meuron. 

Adaptive reuse is not a specialist sideline for the firm but an extension of a much older way of working with existing conditions. Since its founding, the practice has become known for finding architectural potential in what already exists: physical fabric, infrastructure, urban patterns, institutional programmes, cultural memories and material technologies. 

The Tate Modern was the decisive large-scale example; the more recent Küppersmühle expansion in Germany (2021) and the restoration and expansion of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, which has been ongoing since 2006, have developed the method in different directions. At the Tate Modern, the former power station was not treated as scenery: its Turbine Hall became both exhibition space and a civic interior, and a 2016 extension went further by treating former oil tanks as both structural foundations and curatorial prototypes for performance and installation art.

“In projects involving existing structures, reuse is not only an environmentally sustainable solution, but a cultural and spatial opportunity,” says Walschap. “It lets us prepare existing spaces and buildings — sometimes entire neighbourhoods — for the future, bringing them new life through new uses and new users. 

“Existing buildings also carry layers of memory, craftsmanship and urban continuity that give a project a specificity that cannot be replicated. Respecting heritage doesn’t mean freezing a building in a fixed image from the past. Buildings survive because they get adapted to changing circumstances — and because people love and care for them. The real task is figuring out what’s worth keeping, then building a meaningful relationship between that existing structure and a new programme.”

The same logic applied even to M+. Though it rose from newly manufactured land, it wasn’t quite tabula rasa: the museum sits directly atop the Airport Express railway tunnel. The architects turned this from an obstacle into the so-called Found Space, a basement gallery defined by the presence of the tunnel. Walschap describes the discovery of the tunnel as “a pivotal moment for the project — it gave us a way to anchor the building, while at the same time revealing the potentials for a vast, found space we hadn’t anticipated.” Herzog & de Meuron aren’t just architects who preserve old buildings; they’re architects who use constraints as generators.

A piece of the city

That way of thinking has shaped Herzog & de Meuron’s long history of cultural projects. The firm’s 1992 Goetz Collection in Munich began a run of museums, galleries and performance spaces. But there isn’t really a recognisable Herzog & de Meuron museum style. What links these projects is something more fundamental: the idea that a cultural institution should be part of the city around it, not an isolated container for art.

“Cultural projects are public places — they can bring people together beyond a specific interest and should contribute to the life of the neighbourhood and city,” says Walschap. “M+, Tate and Elbphilharmonie are all examples of how projects can foster public life. By providing terraces, viewing platforms, parks, large stairs where people can gather, a project makes space for the community.”

Herzog & de Meuron are now extending that approach to Hangzhou, where they have designed the Grand Canal Museum Complex, which was completed in August 2026. Like M+, this is a new building, not an exercise in adaptive reuse, but Walschap says the same instinct to work with what is already there guided its design. In this case, what already exists is not a building but a landscape, a history and one of China’s most important pieces of infrastructure: a nearly 2,500-year-old, 1,794-kilometre canal that links Beijing with Hangzhou. 

“For the Grand Canal Museum Complex, the starting point was the cultural, urban and social significance of the Grand Canal itself,” he says. “Rather than treating the museum as an isolated object, the project was conceived as part of a larger public landscape and as a place of encounter.”

Its architecture is meant not simply to house exhibitions but to give people another way to engage with the canal. “The design seeks to establish a strong connection between institutional programme and public life,” says Walschap. “The architecture is therefore understood not only as a container for exhibitions, but as an urban framework that can accommodate different forms of use and invite a broad public into the complex.”

Back to the vitrines

Which brings things back to the vitrines at M+. The material inside them comes from the Jacques Herzog und Pierre de Meuron Kabinett, the non-profit foundation established in Basel in 2015 to preserve the architects’ enormous accumulation of drawings, models, photographs, material experiments and other traces of the design process. It is not simply an archive of finished buildings. It contains dead ends, experiments and ideas that may never have been built at all.

“In our work, the Kabinett serves as a long-term point of reference — a way of staying connected to earlier projects, ideas, images and interests,” says Walschap. “It is not a fixed catalogue of solutions or a shortcut to ready-made answers. It can be a reminder of how an earlier project developed, or a particular object or line of research may spark a new direction that we hadn’t yet considered.”

M+ is now becoming part of that process itself. The Kabinett began donating Herzog & de Meuron material to the museum in 2023, creating what Pierre de Meuron has described as a kind of “living archive” connecting Basel and Hong Kong. Herzog & de Meuron: In Focus takes that relationship one step further: the museum is no longer merely one of the firm’s finished projects. It is now a place where the thinking that produced it — and dozens of other buildings — can be taken apart and examined.

What to expect at BODW 2026

Walschap will explore some of the same themes at the Business of Design Week 2026 Summit. He plans to focus particularly on M+, a project he has been involved with since the original competition, as well as the HKJC Conghua Racecourse Grandstand in Guangzhou and The Hyundai Gwangju in South Korea. 

“These three projects show a variety of ways we think about public space and cultural life,” he says, “and how our buildings enter into dialogue with the people who use and inhabit them.”

This story was produced with the support of bodw+. Zolima CityMag maintains editorial independence over its content. Read this story on bodw+.