What happens if you inject Hong Kong’s density into Zurich’s history?

There’s a piece of Hong Kong in Shenzhen – or to be more precise, 44 pieces of it. Hong Kong Typology, an exhibit by Swiss architects Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), features scale models of Hong Kong’s most typical buildings. Tong lau, pencil towers, cruciform apartment blocks – it’s like a collection of puzzle pieces that you can put together to build the city.

“It’s really the toolbox of Hong Kong,” says Christ. “When you see the models there, it captures an essential part of the city.”

Each of the models was made in Hong Kong and shipped to Shenzhen. They are meant to represent the anonymous bulk of the city’s buildings, the unglamorous backdrop to the city’s more recognisable attractions. Visitors may spot some familiar structures, like the rounded, wedding-cake balconies of the 1950s-era Mido Café in Yau Ma Tei. Most of the models inspire a vague sense of déjà vu: they’re familiar but hard to place.

Though the models were made specifically for UABB, Christ and Gantenbein have been working on the project for years. It started when they wanted to shake up the studio experience for the architecture students they teach at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). “In the old European tradition, you would travel to Italy and Greece and look at the classics – even the modernists did that,” says Christ. “There must be an alternative to that classical grand tour.”

Christ thought back to his first trip to Hong Kong in 2000. “It is just so striking, the beauty, the magnetic power of the city,” he says. “It is this encounter of the tropical landscape, this dramatic topography and this sheer pragmatic high-performance architecture. In a way it’s the apotheosis of modernist urbanism and architecture but somehow it has turned and transformed into something different.”

Christ and Gantenbein wondered what would happen if they asked their students to inject Hong Kong-style density into the historic centre of Zurich. “In a way Hong Kong is a European export of a city idea – the British with their pragmatic understanding of modernism, taken to a new world where there are no limits,” he says.