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BAAS Year 3 - Spring 2024

RE-SHAPING CIVICNESS: THE MULTIFUNCTIONAL PUBLIC BUILDING IN HONG KONG

Advisor:

Ying Zhou

Student(s):

Law, Hong Lam Christine

Studio introduction:

The ‘municipal services building (MSB)’ is an architectural type unique to the density of Hong Kong and shaped by its shifting political economy since its inception in the 1970s. With multiple programs vertically stacked into a single volume—from the ‘wet market’ and food courts to a variety of sports facilities, libraries, theaters and other spaces for cultural functions—and located on state-owned and, the MSB today seems to represent a bygone era of civicness, ushered in in the post-war era of modernization. The MSB’s tectonic form and its institutional origin by the now-dissolved representative body of the Urban Council (UC) both express this civicness. That there has been no new constructions of the MSB since the 2010s in the SAR, where the prevalent developmentalist urbanism continues to rapidly replace older buildings with new ones, seems to magnify the precarity of this architectural type in face of a growing erosion of municipalness. This studio takes the opportunity to probe and rethink this notable but indigenous architectural type facing obsolescence. Through testing and making, the studio reshapes the multi-functional public building in Hong Kong.

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