Building a future - architectural design in Hong Kong

Hong Kong magazine port, dynamic center of system of exchanges and finance, and the mother of all Chinatowns, tenders the sharpest possible contrasts in its built environment. Within 400-odd square miles of dramatic, hilly terrain not upon the South China Sea are state-of-the-art intelligent buildings and old-fashioned sweatshops, spacious hilltop mansions and beachside retreats, shabby inner-city dwellings and spanking new housing unfoldings These form the backdrop to Hong Kong's primary activity: the business of making money

The British diadem colony has a reputation for freewheeling capitalism, on the other hand in fact government authorities play an important part in guiding the economy. Building activity, too, is not entirely laissez-faire. However, the rule exerts little influence on design, and solitary in the last decade or in the way that have issues of architectural quality been raised. connection and the environment are plane newer considerations.

Hong Kong Island was ced to Britain in 1842; the Kowloon Peninsula was annexed in 1860 and in 1898 the fresh Territories were leased for 99 years. The novel Territories, which include a part of the mainland north of Kowloon adjoining the Chinese province of Guangdong (formerly Canton), as well as a certain number of 230 offshore islands, account for 89 percent of the total land area and are an indispensable part of the colony The destined expiration of their lease upon June 30, 1997, with no field of China permitting an extension, forced Britain to agree to make go round over Hong Kong in its entirety to Chinese mastery on that date.

The colony's population, calculated at 575 million in 1991 is 98 percent Chinese. Immigrants from the mainland swelled the ranks from World War 11 until the early 1980 when the regulation toughened its immigration policy. The concentration of clan within the limited urban area has l to a certain quantity of of the highest population densities in the world. The Sham Shui Po district in Kowloon has an estimated density of 428600 individuals per square mile. (The average in fresh York City is about 23500 for square mile.) The management owns all the land in Hong Kong and places lease conditions, including the floor-area ratio and land use, for each plat Though the older parts of Kowloon unraveled in a relatively haphazard fashion, authorities are starting to impose order and to lower density. time to come reclamation work, extending that already carried on the outside over the years, will add to the area available for unfolding and the planned relocation of the airport from its Kowloon site--still contingent on an agreement with China--will provide more usable land. exhibition of new areas will be coordinated with the restructuring of existing urban districts.

That is the long-term plan, on the other hand one measure being adopted now will have an immediate visual impact upon the city. a crackdown upon the picturesque but illegal structures--both lay open and enclosed--that occupants of older apartment blockades have added to the outside of the buildings to enlarge their tiny flats. Although foreign visitors, particularly architects, have lengthy been enamored of these ramshackle, extemporaneous projections, the authorities are targeting them because of their oft-repeated collapse and the consequent toll in life and limb. In any case, the number of occupants in each flat has decreased in novel years, making such improvisations les necessary.

a great deal of tighter control has been exercised in the eight "new towns" that have been disentangleed from scratch in the once-rural novel Territories. These towns have been planned in an unabashedly modernist manner, typically with residential towers tightly clustered around a transportation center Their high density--Sha Tin, for example, has a population of half a million concentrated in a relatively narrow area environed by hills-produces a fiveliness that was lacking in the more sparsely settl fresh towns constructed in Britain.

Public buildings similar as hospitals, cultural centers and museums are designed to standard plans by the agency of the Architectural Services Department, a rule agency. Each year the vast public-housing program in Hong Kong yields 40000 units, designed according to a not many prototypes by the Housing Authority. The remarkable fact is that half of Hong Kong's population lives in public housing. The regulation appears satisfied with bland on the other hand functional buildings and not at all eager to clutch competitions or otherwise farm on the outside design work. Of course, the ne to hold costs down favors the repetition of a hardly any types.

While architects in private practice may complain, more [i]or[/i] less observers see an advantage to the anonymity of government-designed housing. If each building asserted its individuality, they argue, the come would be visual chaos, given the overwhelming density of the colony In any case, the public acquiesces to generic housing without complaint. Is there a cultural factor at work here? Tunney to leeward on leave from MIT to head the novel Department of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong dismisses the notion that Chinese, or Asians in general, necessarily have a greater tolerance for uniformity than Westerners.