Golden Moon / LEAD

Architects: LEAD: Kristof Crolla, Adam Fingrut
Year: 2012
Photographs: Kevin Ng, Grandy Lui, Pano Kalogeropoulos, Courtesy of Hong Kong Tourism Board, LEAD
Location: Hongkong

Golden Moon, a temporary public pavilion designed by LEAD in Hong Kong, won the Gold Award at the 2012 Lantern Wonderland competition. Displayed at Victoria Park during the Mid-Autumn Festival, it reinterprets the traditional Chinese lantern, drawing on the legend of Chang’e, the Moon Goddess. The six-story spherical structure features abstract flames symbolizing passionate love, blending bamboo craftsmanship with digital design. Built in just 11 days, the pavilion’s geodesic dome and bamboo grid create an immersive light and color experience. The project exemplifies “building simplexity,” combining modern technology and traditional techniques to achieve complex geometry quickly and efficiently, drawing nearly 500,000 visitors.

The Golden Moon is a temporary architectural installation that showcases the fusion of Hong Kong’s traditional building methods and craftsmanship with modern design techniques, resulting in a highly expressive and engaging public event space. As the Gold Award winner of the 2012 Lantern Wonderland design competition, organized by the Hong Kong Tourism Board for the Mid-Autumn Festival, it was on display for six days in Victoria Park, Hong Kong.

The Golden Moon reinterprets the traditional Chinese lantern, drawing a direct connection to the legend of Chang’e, the Moon Goddess of Immortality—both iconic elements of the Mid-Autumn Festival. In the story, Chang’e resides on the moon, separated from her husband Houyi, who lives on earth. The couple reunites only during the Mid-Autumn Festival when the moon is at its fullest. To represent their passionate love, the six-story spherical lantern is adorned with abstract flames in vibrant colors and patterns. Placed in a reflection pool, the structure accommodates up to 150 visitors, allowing them to fully experience its immersive sound and light display.

Traditional lantern-making materials like translucent fabric, metal wire, and bamboo were scaled up for the Golden Moon. The pavilion’s core structure is a lightweight steel geodesic dome, around which a computer-generated grid was wrapped. This grid was created using bamboo, with Hong Kong’s traditional bamboo scaffolding techniques—commonly used for skyscrapers—employed for its construction. These intuitive and rapid methods were combined with precise digital design to accurately install and shape the bamboo around the dome. The grid was then covered with stretch fabric flames, illuminated by animated LED lighting to create a dynamic visual effect.

The bamboo and flames are arranged in a pattern based on an algorithm for sphere panellisation, creating symmetry and repetition around the equator while introducing imperfection and variation at the poles. This gradual shift, combined with the sweeping, energetic curves of the geometry, forms a dynamic space that draws the viewer’s gaze upward. The cladding grid is set at an angle, giving the dome an asymmetrical directionality. This motion is emphasized by the entrance along the tilted axis, guiding visitors into the sphere and along the grid’s tangents and vectors. The pavilion’s coloration enhances the immersive experience, with the black steel structure serving as a neutral base. Stretch fabric flames in eight vivid colors—ranging from ivory and yellow to deep red and bordeaux—are applied, with the brightest colors at the base and the darkest near the top. At the dome’s peak, the disordered geometry and deep colors blend into the night sky, further dissolving the pattern.

The Golden Moon builds upon research into “building simplexity,” which involves creating complex geometries and spaces using simple means. This approach combines digital design methods like computer programming and CNC fabrication with traditional crafts and materials. For this project, procedural modeling was used to generate the unique spherical geometry, wrapped with a diagrid following a Fibonacci sequence, ensuring order at the equator and randomness at the poles. Code generated simple drawings that enabled workers to easily mark intersections between the steel structure and bamboo. These drawings accounted for traditional bamboo scaffolding details and installation tolerances. Optimization scripts reduced the number of unique stretch-fabric “flames” from 470 to just 10 adaptable types, facilitating faster construction. The project required rapid execution, with only 11 days for on-site construction of the six-story pavilion. Successful completion depended on close collaboration with craftsmen from the outset. Traditional building techniques and familiar methods had to be set aside, as the project demanded a new design and construction approach that bridged the digital and physical worlds. Ultimately, the Golden Moon demonstrates how digital design can be realized in practical, human-centered environments, even under constraints like tight schedules, limited budgets, and the need for flexible, inventive solutions.

The Golden Moon was opened to the public in the evening, featuring a sound and light show visible from both inside and outside the pavilion. It accommodated up to 150 visitors at a time. The main light show, pre-choreographed, lasted three minutes and played every 15 minutes, followed by a 12-minute interlude. The large-scale patterns for the show were designed to be easily viewed from a distance, where the dome appeared as a standalone object. Inside, these patterns became more abstract, immersing visitors in a sensory world of sound, light, and color. The 12-minute intermezzo used non-linear, non-repeating color patterns generated by “agents” or “boids,” simulating the flocking behavior seen in schools of fish or birds. This technique gave the pavilion a dynamic, lifelike quality and ensured a varied experience for visitors throughout the evening.

The Golden Moon was constructed in just 11 days, demonstrating how advanced digital design technology and traditional craftsmanship can combine to create complex geometry quickly and affordably using simple materials. This project redefines digital design by grounding it in tangible, material form. During its six-day display at the 2012 Mid-Autumn Festival, the pavilion attracted nearly 500,000 visitors, using its dynamic space, structure, color, texture, and light to evoke a powerful sensory experience.