The City in the Building, c.1956-

Abstract

From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, a particular housing typology classified as the “composite building” was being built that was synonymous to the intensive post-war urban development in Hong Kong. “Composite” refers to multiple functional uses – always inclusive of the domestic – within a single building complex. Between 1956 and 1965, over 1,500 composite buildings were approved and most were built in Hong Kong. Found in the oldest and busiest parts of the city, most of them remain standing today. Of these, at least twenty contain populations the size of a town. Each occupies an entire urban block. The largest and most populous of these contains almost 10,000 inhabitants, excluding unregistered tenants and illegal squatters. Emerging amidst the economic, social and political exigencies of Hong Kong when the colony massive immigration from the Mainland as a consequence of the 1949 Revolution, the high-rise composite building embodies the paradox of collective sociability within an individual privatized space. Intended as a co-operative building in which every tenant would own his shop or apartment, it is an agglomeration of shops, flats, factories, temples, clinics, crèches, dormitories, hostels, clans and more. The architecture manifest the way its developers, architects and builders projected the notions of a consumerist society: each square foot of habitation is rationalized and quantified. Subsumed by the city’s rapid densification and market-driven development, it seems the composite building is tending towards increased privatization and segregation. Yet the varieties of programs, spatial adaptations and contestations within testify to the combination of pragmatist logic and human caprice that continue to drive and define the city. By examining the intersecting contexts within which the composite building emerged, this paper contends that it is a potential site for speculations on contemporary development where dwelling and the city could be consummated in the most integrated ways possible.