PATTERNS OF LIVING (家)

Dr Lee has recently published a book, Patterns of Living: Hong Kong’s High-Rise Communities 《設計生活模式 香港高樓社區》with architecture historian Hilary French from the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, in collaboration with Interior Design Year 1 students of HKDI. The book is the result of a one-year study with the research question - “how do citizens in one of ‘the most liveable cities in the world’ actually live?”
 

This book takes readers inside people’s homes capturing a glimpse of their patterns of living through a series of drawings and snapshots of typical interiors in diverse districts of Hong Kong. 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.

 

Based on the ideals of European modernist 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 it began 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 living reality of modernist housing project – and highlights particular type of residence design that housing studies now categorise as ‘indeterminate’: it is offered to tenants as a single room to partition to suit their own demand. 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. Starting from Tseung Kwan O, the majority of the case studies are selected from estates in the New Territories and Kowloon districts by participating students, and a small number of cases are from contact with a local group of wheelchair users.