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Opinion
Don’t let Hong Kong’s construction innovation stop with Covid-19
- The erection of isolation facilities for Covid-19 patients shows that, when the authorities get serious, they can build quickly
- But it shouldn’t take a crisis to realise Hong Kong’s potential; the city should be at the forefront of construction research and development
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Dennis Lee is a Hong Kong-born, America-licensed architect with years of design experience in the US and China.
About 75 years ago, when Le Corbusier sketched out a “plug-in concept” for the Unite d’Habitation residential project in Marseilles, the French master architect already envisioned prefabricated apartments being hoisted and inserted into a concrete structural frame. His vision was limited only by the technology available at the time.
In recent decades, architects from Europe to North America have been adopting various forms of modular integrated construction (MiC), from retrofitting decommissioned shipping containers to repurposing large concrete piping for commercial and residential use.
Fast forward to 2016 and New York’s SHoP Architects completed the B2 affordable housing project in Brooklyn – the tallest modular building in the world at the time, at 32 storeys. The project was realised in a city with building codes as stringent as Hong Kong’s, if not more so.
Hong Kong caught up in 2020 and completed the first 89-unit MiC housing project on Nam Cheong Street. However, the construction technique was not popularised until the pandemic demanded that many habitable units be built quickly. All of a sudden, MiC became a household nomenclature even for people who had not been quarantined in one of the units.
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