Patterns of Living – Hong Kong’s High Rise Communities
Patterns of Living – Hong Kong’s High Rise Communities
Hilary French & Yanki Lee
23 Jun 2013
How do citizens in one of ‘the most livable cities in the world’ actually live? Almost 50% of Hong Kong‘s population, some 3.5 million people live in public housing. They occupy the high density, high-rise tower blocks, in small apartments that have been standardised, serialised, repeated and refined for efficiency in construction. Patterns of Living, a publication that captures essence of a research project investigating Hong Kong’s high rise communities, takes you inside some of their homes capturing a glimpse of their lives through a series of drawings and snapshots of typical interiors.
The study was carried out as part of the ‘Livable Cities’ agenda at the HKDI as part of the Visiting Fellows scheme intended to explore alternative art and design research models under the directorship of Leslie Lu, VTC Academic Director (Design), Principal of Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI) & Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Lee Wai Lee).
Based on the ideals of European modernism’s housing project, the Hong Kong Housing Authority (HKHA) has pioneered high-rise construction, producing some of the World’s densest, most vertical residential areas since its starting point in the mid 1950s. Data were collected and analysed from 120 typical homes to discover how families occupy the compact flats that have continued to be developed, maintained and rented by HKHA. The research shows for the first time the interiors – the lived reality of modernism's housing project – and has highlighted a particular flat type that housing studies now categorise as ‘indeterminate’: it is offered to tenants as a single room to partition to suit their own desires. Its success offers a model with international significance, controversial especially in rental housing, but potentially a way forward in reducing housing costs and allowing future flexibility.
The information was gathered by HKDI Product and Interior Design students, in their first year of study, who were asked to focus on the architecture and interior of their own home, and then their neighbours' and friends'. There are clearly limitations to the objectivity, of any such study but whilst the students could not be considered 'knowledgeable informants' in architectural terms, they can all be seen to belong to one group, as all apart from one were still living in the family home. Almost all returned with drawings and photographs of standard public housing types, generally those designed and built by the Hong Kong Housing Authority. From the starting point of Tseung Kwan O, the majority of the case studies are self-selected from estates located in the New Territories and Kowloon districts and a small number are from contact with a local group of wheelchair users. The information will be of interest to architects and designers working in housing, social scientists, students, and a well-informed general readership.
Patterns of Living was co-authored by Hilary FRENCH and Dr Yanki LEE. Hilary FRENCH is an architect and architectural historian in the School of Design at the Royal College of Art, London. She has written and edited a number of books, including Accommodating Change: Innovation in Housing (2002), New Urban Housing (Laurence King, 2006) and Key Urban Housing of the Twentieth Century (Laurence King 2009). Dr. Yanki LEE is director of EXHIBIT CIC, a social design agency in London. A graduate in architecture and PhD in design participation, Lee was a research fellow at the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, from 2000 to 2011 and is currently a visiting fellow at HKDI.
Published by New Talents Press of VTC, Patterns of Living is first launched in the Hong Kong Book Fair 2013, held in mid-July at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Interview with Hilary French by Leslie Lu, HKDI Principal
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