Nigel Reading's groundbreaking buildings may be coming to Hong Kong

It's not often that an architect is invited to speak at a science conference, but Nigel Reading isn't your average architect.

Born in Hong Kong, raised in Australia and educated in Britain, Reading is a colourful character with a quirky take on life. His offbeat approach feeds into his work, and if things go his way we might see one of his otherworldly structures built in Hong Kong.

The science conference was in October. It was the 8th Constructal Law Science Conference at Nanjing University, and Reading was invited to present the asynsis (asymptotic synthesis) principle, a theory he began working on as a student in 1991.

At the core of his work is the "golden ratio", a term that used to describe aesthetically pleasing works of art and architecture.

But it's more than just a term, it's an actual ratio. In its most simple form, the golden ratio, expressed by the Greek letter phi, is 1.618... It's hard to not think of Egypt's ancient pyramids and Greece when we think of the golden ratio, and that's precisely where Reading's fascination began. It's a ratio deeply embedded in many works of art and architecture.

At the age of 21, he took a couple of years off before he began university, bought a motorbike and toured Europe, Egypt and the pyramids.