Constructing civicness: the architectural type of the ‘Municipal Services Buildings’ from British Hong Kong to the SAR

Abstract

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 land, the MSB today seems to represent a bygone era of civicness. The MSB’s tectonic form and its institutional origin by the now-dissolved representative body of the Urban Council both express this civicness. In a prevalent developmentalist urbanism that continues to rapidly replace older buildings with new ones, the MSB, though a recent postwar spatial product, is a notable indigenous architectural type facing encroaching obsolescence.

This piece will unpack the development trajectory of the MSB, contextualizing its inceptions as Urban Council complexes in the aftermaths of civil disturbances from the late 1960s, the consequent shifts in the British colonial administration toward the provisions of the public, and the type’s embodiment of these ensuing civic aspirations in what is over wise well-known as an epitome of laissez faire governance. The construction of the Urban Council complexes by the then-newly formed and elected Urban Council and its tectonic language of architectural modernism exemplify the implementation of civicness in both idea and form. The disruptions and continuities as result of the political economic transition of the Handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, a decolonization of the territory sans independence, are also manifested in the genealogy of the UC complexes, renamed as MSBs after 1997, physically and institutionally. The ways colonial conceptions for the function of culture have been maintained, by a new chief-executive-appointed Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) in the MSBs, while the markets are outsourced in a growing reliance on private investment in the last decade reveal the repercussions of the ongoing economic transition in the Special Administrative Region (SAR). That there has been no new constructions of the MSB since the 2010s in the SAR seem to magnify the precarity of this architectural type a in face of a growing erosion of municipalness.

Despite what is an emerging popular consciousness for historic buildings since the Handover, the concurrent condoning of the demolition of the architecturally-modern General Post Office and the mass protest for the preservation of an architecturally-classic service reservoir in the early 2020s, for example, call out a persistent popular affection biasing against architectural modernism, to which the MSBs’ designs belong. In face of growing obsolescence, the MSB, a type that is part of this overlooked genre of historical buildings, is thus worthy of further examination.