Houses Like Water: Observations and Reflections on House Types of Kat O Fishing Village in Hong Kong

Abstract

Liquid Homes: Building, Living and Other Stories of Hong Kong Fishing Villages is a research, curatorial, and design collaboration that explores the culture of Tanka people and their fluid state of living and building, presenting stories from a long overdue reading of the other Hong Kong. This essay, as an ongoing work, intends to reflect on our recent observations of the houses in Kat O fishing village by documenting the self-built additions in relation to the surrounding topography and water environment. These findings evoke an understanding of houses as “amphibious creatures” of hybrid qualities riding on the seams between land and water, and denote the notion of homes as “fluid entities”—physical yet elusive, subject to the floating identity of the community. The research intends to offer an ethnographic reading of Hong Kong coastal settlements and their building typologies, rethink building materialities by their temporal qualities and beyond the physical matter, and imagine a renewed reading on the dialectical relation between the built and the natural, and propose new ways to design sustainable architecture through the landscape.