Golden Moon: A Fusion of Tradition and Innovation

LEAD's Award-Winning Design Merges Craftsmanship and Digital Techniques

LEAD's Golden Moon revisits the concept of a Chinese lantern and makes a direct link to the legend of Chang’e, the Moon Goddess of Immortality – two elements strongly associated with the Mid-Autumn Festival. The 6-storey-high, spherical moon lantern is clad with abstracted flames, colours, and patterns. It is placed in a reflection pool and is large enough for people to walk inside and be fully immersed in the sound and light experience.

The Golden Moon is the 2012 Gold Award winning entry for the Lantern Wonderland design competition and was on display for 6 days in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park. It explores how traditional materials for making lanterns, such as translucent fabric and bamboo, have been applied on a large scale. A light-weight steel geodesic dome forms the pavilion’s primary structure and is the basis for a computer-generated grid wrapped around it. This grid is materialised through a secondary structure from bamboo, using Hong Kong’s traditional bamboo scaffolding techniques.

The Golden Moon was built in only 11 days, showing how a combination of state-of-the-art digital design technology with traditional manual craftsmanship can construct complex geometry at high speed and low cost. It rethinks the premise of digital design by anchoring the paradigm in a strong materiality. The pavilion uses its dynamic space, structure, colour, texture, and light to trigger a sensuous response from visitors of 2012’s Mid-Autumn Festival.

The project faced several challenges, including a limited time frame, low budgets, and minimal precision. To overcome these, a very close conversation with the craftsmen was required from the beginning. Preconceptions of building methods and familiar construction techniques had to be abandoned as both the digital and the material world demanded a new design and building set-up to be devised.

The Golden Moon is a testament to the power of combining traditional craftsmanship with digital design techniques. It was awarded Platinum in A' Architecture, Building and Structure Design Award in 2013, recognizing its world-class, exceptional, and highly innovative design that contributes to societal wellbeing. It is indeed a defining aesthetic of an era, advancing the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology, and making the world a better place.