Peter Steinhauer's Cocoon series looks at a construction tradition native to Hong Kong. PETER STEINHAUER

If you wander through the streets of Hong Kong, you’ll notice something odd about some of the buildings.

It’s hard to miss. These buildings, which soar dozens of stories into the sky, are sheathed in a bright, primary-colored nylon mesh material. It looks like a large-scale art project, but it actually has a purely practical application: Shielding construction sites and their debris from Hong Kong’s densely-packed streets.

American photographer Peter Steinhauer, has worked as an artist in Asia since the early ‘90s (he currently lives in San Francisco). In his Cocoon series, he documents the surprising beauty of Hong Kong’s in-progress construction.

Steinhauer recalls the first time he ever saw a wrapped building back in the ’90s. “I saw a giant, 40-story package in the middle of this dense city,” he says. “It was just oddly beautiful to me; it captured my imagination immediately.”

At first Peter figured it was the work of Christo, the artist known for swathing public spaces in materials. But then he kept seeing them. “I realized it must be something with construction,” he says.

Steinhauer thinks this cocoon was originally yellow, and turned teal after someone tried to dye it blue. Image: Peter Steinhauer

If you look closely, you’ll see that the buildings are actually caged in a bamboo scaffolding. It serves the same purpose as the metal variety you see in the U.S., but bamboo is lighter and more flexible, which is important for a city that experiences intense rains and winds. The nylon wraps go over the bamboo to keep debris from falling onto the densely packed streets. This practice goes back at least to the 19th century; pictures from then show buildings covered in these bamboo cages....Continue Reading

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