Factors affecting open building implementation in high density mass housing design in Hong Kong

The vast majority of buildings being constructed in Hong Kong today are massive 40+-storey high-rise residential building towers housing hundreds of families. Immense resources – land, material, time, labour, money, energy – have been invested in their realization. However, almost all of these buildings, including those currently under construction and on the drawing boards, are not designed with adaptability and flexibility as a design intention and will cause major problems in the future: their lack of capacity for re-activation means that their only fate is demolition, thereby consuming even more resources, producing more waste, and causing more disruption to the environment. Unless we change our mind-set in mass housing design, today's designs will inevitably become tomorrow's problems. This paper studies the scenario design requirements and critical dimensions of use-territories in public mass housing in Hong Kong in view of extracting useful patterns for use in future designs. Case studies of popular residential layouts currently used in Hong Kong will be used to illustrate the kind of problems the majority of the existing residential building stock will face when the need for renewal and upgrade arises.