Text description provided by the architects. The micro-dwelling units is approximately 3 meters wide by 2.5 meters long and 3.7 meters tall. The built example constitutes a home for a single resident or couple with cooking, sleeping and sitting areas built-in. The various sized units fit together to form a larger assemblage with some functioning as services for the larger communities and others as areas for communal dining, games, education, etc.
These larger groupings of homes will be serviced through a singular backbone providing water and electricity to individual units and disposing of waste, while cooling, heating, structure, and enclosure are provided by building in existing industrial buildings in the city centre. The flexibility of the single unit aids in the overall adaptability of the larger community as units can be joined and easily separated and altered as the population changes. Allowing a simple in inexpensive structural system to service many different demographics of people.
Some 280,000 plus individuals living within Hong Kong are without any permanent form of housing. This lack of available housing has led many to build temporary structures that they live in hidden within plain sight. Together this significant population constitutes A New Walled City. Not constrained to a single geography or architectural type, these inhabitants of illegal structures exist at the fringe of society, constrained by income and isolated in homes that are undocumented and unaccounted for.
The Bamboo Micro-House is a prototype for transitional housing to be built in the underutilized industrial buildings of Hong Kong. The concept is to provide temporary housing as a necessary step to the many families and individuals on the path to permanent public housing. The built prototype and the drawings encompass two parts of an interactive exhibition at the Hong Kong/ Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale. Visitors can walk into and sit inside the small house to understand the problem of social housing in Hong Kong and similar urban areas across the world, as a provocation towards what can be done for residents of many cities across the globe.
