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Coronavirus Hong Kong
CommentHong Kong
Dennis Lee
Dennis Lee

Opinion | Don’t let Hong Kong’s construction innovation stop with Covid-19

  • The erection of isolation facilities for Covid-19 patients shows that, when the authorities get serious, they can build quickly
  • But it shouldn’t take a crisis to realise Hong Kong’s potential; the city should be at the forefront of construction research and development

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Construction workers put together the Tsing Yi mobile cabin hospital in Hong Kong on February 26, part of the rapid construction of temporary isolation and treatment facilities amid a surge in Covid-19 infections. Photo: Xinhua
Dennis Lee

About 75 years ago, when Le Corbusier sketched out a “plug-in concept” for the Unite d’Habitation residential project in Marseilles, the French master architect already envisioned prefabricated apartments being hoisted and inserted into a concrete structural frame. His vision was limited only by the technology available at the time.

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In recent decades, architects from Europe to North America have been adopting various forms of modular integrated construction (MiC), from retrofitting decommissioned shipping containers to repurposing large concrete piping for commercial and residential use.

Fast forward to 2016 and New York’s SHoP Architects completed the B2 affordable housing project in Brooklyn – the tallest modular building in the world at the time, at 32 storeys. The project was realised in a city with building codes as stringent as Hong Kong’s, if not more so.

Hong Kong caught up in 2020 and completed the first 89-unit MiC housing project on Nam Cheong Street. However, the construction technique was not popularised until the pandemic demanded that many habitable units be built quickly. All of a sudden, MiC became a household nomenclature even for people who had not been quarantined in one of the units.
The 3,000 units at the Penny’s Bay Quarantine Centre were built within 10 months, with the first phase rolled out in July 2020. When confronted with the fifth wave of the Covid-19 outbreak, the government moved up a gear and got the mainland’s help to target the construction of 17,000 units across eight new community isolation facilities, all of which are employing variations of the same construction technique.

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Hong Kong’s community isolation facilities, how do they work?

Hong Kong’s community isolation facilities, how do they work?

The construction of these basic units within days or weeks deserves credit and recognition. But, without taking anything away from the hard work and efforts of the teams that completed these projects, it was nothing “miraculous”. The efficiency and benefits of MiC might have been an eye-opener for our officials. However, it is nothing new for the construction world.

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