The Forgotten Urban Living Rooms: the Municipal Services Buildings of Hong Kong

Abstract

<p>Despite being one of the colonial-era spatial instruments for placating the post-war refugee influx, the ‘municipal services building (MSB)’ in Hong Kong today has evolved to become an indigenous architectural type where the public “urban living room” is actualized. From the modernist Kwun Chung MSB by Wong & Ouyang to the Kowloon City MSB by P+T that harks to the Pompidou, young and old come together to eat, read, work-out and repose. Compelled into existence by demographic density and a planning-imposed space scarcity, the extensions of eating, studying, working out, which in other cities can take place in the private domestic sphere or in separate single-function volumes, are condensed in the MSB’s vertically stacking of multiple programs. From the wet market and food courts to sports facilities, libraries, and theaters, the fact that this uber social condenser has remained publicly owned also confounds the market-priorities of laissez faire governance. This piece will firstly briefly unpack the development trajectory of the MSB, contextualizing its inceptions as Urban Council complexes in the aftermaths of civil disturbances from the late 1960s, and the type’s embodiment of these ensuing civic aspirations. Renamed as MSBs after 1997’s Handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, they have remained the last public bastions in the Special Administrative Region transitioning further into executive-led neoliberalization. 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 it has embodied. In face of obsolescence, a re-visiting of what seems to represent today a bygone era of civicness is much warranted.<br></p>