Ordinary Gweilo

There was an intriguing piece in last week’s Sunday Morning Post about an architect who is renting two adjoining apartments in a Kowloon Tong apartment block. It seems that he managed to persuade the owner and the management company to allow him to remove the front doors of both apartments and construct a new front door in the common area between them. This seems to have involved installing a plywood box in the common area, which doesn’t sound very secure. In Singapore, it seems they have a different approach Shuxie reports that her apartment is being extended by 10 square metres!

A few months ago, my neighbourhood had to vote to decide if they wanted to get an ‘upgrading’ for their public housing buildings (“HDB”). The buildings around here are 20-30 years old, and while they are perfectly allright for anyone to live in (they have been built by a public company, unlike the renegade private developers in Hong Kong who tend to save on the quality of the concrete – and I got this information first hand from someone involved in construction of buildings in HK, buildings that are designed for a useful life of 20 years against the usual practice of 50 years)), I won’t complain if they put a new lift that stop at each floor or renovate the minimalist bathroom.

But one thing included in the package was more surprising: they proposed to increase the size of the flat by about 10 square metres… even at the 21st floor! Unlike you built some kind of balcony, it is difficult to get new area over here, and you just don’t add a balcony, it needs to be integrated to the overall structure of the building…

They have just brought the extension by truck and are currently placing them: Just like LEGO bricks, they are lifting these concrete bricks to their new position in front of the windows of the flats, and will surely find a way to fix it, I hope solidly… I knew they were using prefabricated parts to build the flats more quickly (there is even a dedicated factory in the North of the island), but it is the first time that I see it used for an addition to an existing building. Luckily Singapore does not have to undergo typhoons or significant earthquakes, and the HDB buildings are built bar-shaped, not tower-shaped, so you get somehing quite stable.

Apparently, as well as voting in favour of the scheme, you also have to vote for the PAP (the governing party). At the last two elections, the PAP promised that areas that voted for the party would get priority for public housing upgrades. Alexandre’s site looks very good – clean and uncluttered, but with plenty of photographs. Worth a look!