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Colonial architectural slants shine spotlight on Hong Kong’s right to light

蘋果日報 2021/01/10 00:01


The architectural slants of buildings from the colonial era have cut impressive figures into some of the skylines of Hong Kong’s oldest districts. This unique urban feature from the ’60s serves as a vivid reminder of the historical building ordinance, which once regulated the city’s street shadow areas in the hope to guarantee citizens’ rights to light.
Buildings with pyramid-like top floors are mainly found in old neighborhoods such as Jordan and Wan Chai. Lee Ho-yin, co-founder and director of the Architectural Conservation Programmes at the University of Hong Kong, considers the eight buildings on Ferry Street in Yau Ma Tei a classic example.
The eight traditional residential buildings – formerly known as Man Wah Sun Chuen – are nicknamed the “Eight Man Buildings” because their names all start with the Cantonese “man.” Built in the ’60s and the ’70s, each of the tetrad-arranging blocks has access to two streets. While one side of the top floors is sloped, the other that faces the now-reclaimed sea is vertical with no slant, making a unique spectacular estate as a whole.
The architecture style dates back to the 1894 plague epidemic which cost 20,000 lives in Hong Kong. Alarmed by the sanitary condition, the colonial government introduced the British concept of street shadow area limitations to the city, regulating the heights and angles of buildings in order to ensure sufficient sunlight on every street to kill infection-causing bacteria.
In 1903, street shadow area limitations were mandated under the building ordinance of the same year, specifying a diagonal of 63.5 degrees from the street’s median ground line to the edge of the roof of any building with 20 floors or less. Following rapid population growth, the ordinance was revised in 1955 and permitted considerably higher structures with a more lenient 76-degree rule.
However, the Eight Man Buildings only serve to show that street shadow area limitations have failed to secure the rights to light of Hongkongers. “Look how dense the Eight Man Buildings are! Sunlight is blocked most of the time,” Lee notes. Despite having complied with the regulation, the narrow spacing between the blocks made it impossible for natural light to reach the streets.
The subtropical climate in Hong Kong also presented another problem. “The street shadow area limitations only work in high-latitude countries with limited sunlight exposure all year round such as Britain. Places in the subtropical zone or close to the equator like Hong Kong always have the sun overhead in summer.” With developers kept pressing their demand to erect higher buildings, the restriction was finally revoked in 1987.
“Under the new regulation, a composite building was allowed to have a non-residential podium as tall as 15 meters, in addition to a residential tower on top.” Lee says the new regulation aims to facilitate ventilation within buildings with narrow tops and wide bottoms, even if they are connected. Cactus Mansion in Wan Chai, for instance, is a result of the transition between the two regulations, where a podium and slanted top floors co-exist.
“The 15-meter podium requirement was actually a better suggestion than the street shadow area limitations. But to everyone’s surprise, developers made use of that to acquire the land of a whole street and build clusters of skyscrapers that stand together like a wall,” says Lee. Hindered air circulation and slow cooling rates that come with the urban heat island effect, promoted by towers of walled buildings, make summer unbearably hot to shop tenants and residents.
The sustainable building design guidelines in 2010 aim to regulate the building separation, building setback and greenery coverage. Under the new requirement, an intervening space equivalent to 20% to 33.3% of the total frontage area of the building is required on certain development sites.
However, all these building regulations have never managed to stop high-rises from springing up in the old districts, due to the dominance of property developers in the city’s urban development. In the 2019 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Report, Hong Kong was ranked the 38th most livable city among 140, down from 35th a year prior.
Lee finds other metropolises such as New York and Singapore more livable than Hong Kong, because of the restrictions on building heights and the density in residential areas. “Skyscrapers only exist in business areas in these big cities. A residential building with over 10 floors is unusual in other countries but it’s no big deal in Hong Kong.”
Slanted-tops buildings also demonstrate how local real estate developers try to earn every penny. Cactus Mansion in Wan Chai, built under height restriction required by the street shadow area limitations, has a little green tin house on the rooftop so that extra money can be made. “The space is so small that you can hardly enter even if you tilt your body sideways.”
While most of the sloped top floors and tiny rooftop units had been removed for redevelopment, it does not change the fact that “the urban planning of Hong Kong has always been dominated by property developers throughout our entire history,” Lee concludes.
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