Building a future - architectural design in Hong Kong

Art in America, July, 1993 by Hiroshi Watanabe

Hong Kong, entrepot port, dynamic center of commerce and finance, and the mother of all Chinatowns, offers the sharpest possible contrasts in its built environment. Within 400-odd square miles of dramatic, hilly terrain off the South China Sea are state-of-the-art intelligent buildings and old-fashioned sweatshops, spacious hilltop mansions and beachside retreats, shabby inner-city tenements and spanking new housing developments. These form the backdrop to Hong Kong's primary activity: the business of making money.

The British crown colony has a reputation for freewheeling capitalism, but in fact government authorities play an important role in guiding the economy. Building activity, too, is not entirely laissez-faire. However, the government exerts little influence on design, and only in the last decade or so have issues of architectural quality been raised. Context and the environment are even newer considerations.

Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain in 1842; the Kowloon Peninsula was annexed in 1860, and in 1898 the New Territories were leased for 99 years. The New Territories, which include a part of the mainland north of Kowloon adjoining the Chinese province of Guangdong (formerly Canton), as well as some 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 on June 30, 1997, with no prospect of China permitting an extension, forced Britain to agree to turn over Hong Kong in its entirety to Chinese control on that date.

The colony's population, calculated at 5.75 million in 1991, is 98 percent Chinese. Immigrants from the mainland swelled the ranks from World War 11 until the early 1980s, when the government toughened its immigration policy. The concentration of people within the limited urban area has led to some of the highest population densities in the world. The Sham Shui Po district in Kowloon has an estimated density of 428,600 persons per square mile. (The average in New York City is about 23,500 per square mile.) The government owns all the land in Hong Kong and sets lease conditions, including the floor-area ratio and land use, for each plot. Though the older parts of Kowloon developed in a relatively haphazard fashion, authorities are starting to impose order and to lower density. Future reclamation work, extending that already carried out over the years, will add to the area available for development, and the planned relocation of the airport from its Kowloon site--still contingent upon an agreement with China--will provide more usable land. Development of new areas will be coordinated with the restructuring of existing urban districts.

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

Much tighter control has been exercised in the eight "new towns" that have been developed from scratch in the once-rural New 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 surrounded by hills-produces a fiveliness that was lacking in the more sparsely settled new towns constructed in Britain.

Public buildings such as hospitals, cultural centers and museums are designed to standard plans by the Architectural Services Department, a government agency. Each year the huge public-housing program in Hong Kong yields 40,000 units, designed according to a few prototypes by the Housing Authority. The remarkable fact is that half of Hong Kong's population lives in public housing. The government appears satisfied with bland but functional buildings and not at all eager to hold competitions or otherwise farm out design work. Of course, the need to keep costs down favors the repetition of a few types.

While architects in private practice may complain, some observers see an advantage to the anonymity of government-designed housing. If each building asserted its individuality, they argue, the result 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 Lee, on leave from MIT to head the new 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.