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West Kowloon Cultural District Authority has announced plans to build a new Museum of Visual Culture called M+, in West Kowloon, Hong Kong.

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M+ will be built within the 14-hectare West Kowloon Cultural District, on the waterfront of the Victoria Harbour. The new museum will encompass an area of about 60,000 square metre, and will accommodate approximately 20,000 square metre of exhibition space and 14,000 square metres for conservation and storage, an education centre, an archive library and bookstore, theatres and screen facilities, artist-in-residence studios and outdoor green spaces, subject to the future detailed design.

The physical design of M+ will be shaped around the museum's core values. It will provide space for artists to meet, exhibit and experiment. It will house a permanent visual culture collection from Hong Kong, Chinese, Asia and other places. M+ will also aim to complement the 'white cubes' and 'black boxes' of the contemporary art museum with 'third spaces,' which are new formats of interactive space and new interfaces between public space and back-of-house area.

The facility will provide multiple flexible platforms for multidisciplinary programming, exploring art, design, architecture and the moving image. The project forms phase I of the West Kowloon Cultural District development scheme.

Construction of the M+ will be undertaken in phased manner and is scheduled to commence in 2013. Langdon & Seah (L&S), a subsidiary of the Netherland’s-based Arcadis, has been appointed as full-service Quantity Surveying Consultant for the M+ phase I.