Housing Re-public Exhibition

Housing Re-public is the title of a research project and exhibition conducted by Rico Samuel Diedering and Pedram Ghelichi on public housing architecture.

The public housing stock in Hong Kong is increasingly recognised by netizens and academics alike. However, contemporary accounts either romanticise the details of single estates or reduce the complex history of government-sponsored housing to isolated events.

Countering the general assumption that low-cost housing is solely designed by government departments, this research identifies a unique and yet overlooked twenty-year period between the 1970s and 1990s, in which Hong Kong’s colonial government embraced private architects' involvement to sustain the public housing program. This research highlights the emergence of a unique tower typology in which conventions of repetition and raw efficiency are replaced by diversity, flexibility and spatiality. Thus, no longer are these towers the result of a coincidental design of two-dimensional floors but a conscious examination of a three-dimensional public space.