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Join HKIA
Docomomo HK is holding a walk through Kowloon City and its soon-to-be-demolished Municipal Services Building (MSB) built by Palmer and Turner in 1985, and is opening 10 places for interested HKIA members. Please express your interest in joining by filling out the online registration form here.
Quota: 10 (first-come-first-served)
Date: 20/1/2024 (Sat)
Time: 10:30am to 12:00nn
The Kowloon City MSB, located across the now-gone Kowloon Walled City, is one of the more than two dozen vertically-stacked multi-functional civic buildings, which the then Urban Council (UC) built in the lead-up to Hong Kong’s 1997 Handover. As Hong Kong’s indigenous architectural type, where the public “urban living room”—à la the Metabolists—is actualized, 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 privacy of the domestic sphere or in separate volumes of singular functions, are socially condensed in the MSB’s single volume, from the wet market and food courts to a variety of sports facilities, libraries, theaters, and other spaces for cultural functions.
Dr. Ying Zhou, incumbent president of DocomomoHK and associate professor of architecture at HKU, will share a small presentation on the background of the buildings before leading a small tour of the building.
