How the Scholar’s Rock Inspired Our Hong Kong Maison’s Architecture

Y ou are standing atop a long flight of stairs. Your heart steadies, readying body and mind to descend. What you see is an inversion of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Here, the tunnel is the light. And beyond is darkness.

Step down, down, down – and at last you arrive in the Grotto, the dramatic central ground floor space of Sotheby’s new Maison, a building that’s as much of an artwork as anything hanging in the galleries.

“What we’ve created here is a transformational space,” says Rotterdam-based MVRDV founding partner Jacob van Rijs, who brought the vision to life. “It's all about the atmosphere and creating a sort of magic.”

A transitional portal cutting across the two floors of Sotheby’s Maison, the staircase comprises intricate layers of laser-cut wood that evoke a geological passageway inspired by the Chinese scholar’s rock. Fundamental to Taoism and cherished by the literati, scholar’s rocks were revered as microcosms of the universe, their abstract beauty inspiring centuries of sublime Chinese art and literature.

In his ode to the scholar’s rock, the prolific Song dynasty poet, artist and calligrapher Su Shi (1037-1101) wrote, “The stone is patterned and ugly. From this one word ‘ugly’ comes a thousand shapes and ten thousand forms.” This abject beauty of the rock is echoed throughout the space in transgressive organic forms that contour the ceiling and walls and reject the sharp right-angles of conventional spaces. You can see this in two additional spaces flanking the Grotto – the Pantheon and the Sanctum – each meticulously crafted from layered wood in shades of inky charcoal and deep burgundy respectively.

“The scholar’s rock is an interesting and exciting object for an architect because it is spatial,” van Rijs says. “We also took some inspiration from the European grotto because although they exist on a difference scale, there are spatial similarities. The link we can draw with a scholar’s rock between architecture and art also became one of our inspirations. Scholar’s rocks are not made, rather they are created – so here, perhaps Mother Nature is the artist. That it is not a sculpture in the Western notion of fine art was another interesting observation for us.”

In another nod to Taoist tradition, the fundamental design principle of the two-storey, 24,000 square-foot Sotheby’s Maison emphasises the duality of yin-yang. From the intimate, dark, and organic aesthetic experience of the ground floor, visitors pass through the dramatically carved stairwell and emerge blinking on the brightly lit first floor, with its expansive contemporary glass fronts facing the busy thoroughfare of Hong Kong’s famous Landmark complex.

“We have to make it easy for people to enter, and that’s what makes it accessible,” van Rijs explains. “We chose floor-to-ceiling glass fronts because we want to maximise visibility from the circulation spaces to create awareness.”

Adopting a material palette core to Sotheby’s DNA, MVRDV imbued the first floor with natural materials such as walnut and marble, graced with touches of steel in champagne and Sotheby’s signature blue.

The result is a concept store delivering a new retail experience for art and luxury, encompassing a radical curation of more than 200 objects spanning 80 million years of history. The juxtaposition of dinosaur fossils with contemporary art and vintage movie posters, and African tribal masks with classical Chinese ceramics and Old Master drawings, reflects the synchronicity of art through time.

“Our approach has always been to look at things from as many angles as possible to find surprising solutions, and ultimately to find the best one where our design efforts will make a positive impact,” van Rijs says. For the Maison, “we envisioned a space where the barriers between the public and priceless art collections are reimagined, making art accessible in new and daring ways.”