Five years ago, Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron completed Tai Kwun in Hong Kong, a former British police station and prison-cell compound turned cultural centre. If ever there was a building haunted by the ghosts of a colonial past, this was it: a dense network of structures of control set around prison yards and parade grounds. Their newer building M+, which bills itself as “Asia’s first global museum of visual culture”, is almost its exact opposite.

Sited in a landscape reclaimed from the water, across the harbour from Hong Kong Island on Kowloon, it sits on virgin territory, unfreighted by history or ruins. The architects, desperate to find a foothold, managed to locate something below ground, an archaeology of engineering on which to anchor the new institution. Its basement is a diagonal void, the indicator of the presence of the Airport Express train line directly below, an attempt to make visible the otherwise invisible, the engineering of complex infrastructure. The dramatic void, a concrete cavern to recall the same architects’ Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, is referred to as the “Found Space”, though they clearly had to work quite hard to find it.

Like all museums, though, M+ is nothing if not a repository of memory. Even in its architecture it embodies a sense of Hong Kong’s particular condition as a city of towers in which the individual structures are often generic, banal even, yet which collectively come together to create a cityscape of awe-inspiring modernity.