apartment house on a hill-side, in 18 months is ab- solutely phenomenal. With all the modern conveniences and so called model work-methods that we use here in the United States, your methods and your results are as good as, if not superior to, anything that I have seen in the United States in the apartment construction industry.
"We are still building apartment houses mostly out of frame and stucco. Only a very few mass apartments have been built out of poured concrete and I do not believe any of those have been to the extent of the complex we were shown.
"I believe the workmanship in that apartment house complex was superior to the workmanship that are put in- to our buildings of all types, except public work here in the United States. I was particularly impressed with the size of the rooms in the apartment house; the parquet flooring and especially the three bathrooms, one for each bedroom, and the extra commode facilities in the master bathroom plus the fact that these bathrooms were com- pletely tiled. They were indeed beautiful workmanship.
‘Adding to all of this, the fact that they were priv- ately financed is truely amazing and your people can certainly be congratulated on the type of work that they are doing.
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now that most of this work had been done, the time was opportune for the new headquarters to be built.
The new building will bring under one roof all the various departments of the Ministry which are now accommodated in annexes. The television education section will remain at the Teachers' Training College in Paterson Road.
In the new building the lower floors will be used by sections of the Ministry which have dealings with the public, so as to facilitate access.
The examinations division will occupy both the ground and first floors. Part of the ground floor will also house the canteen.
The second floor will accommodate the accounts division; the third and fourth floors the establishments division; fifth floor the examinations, registry and statistics departments: sixth floor the general administration depart- ment: seventh floor the Ministerial suite, including offices for the Permanent Secretary, his deputy and superscale officers: eighth floor the textbooks and syllabus division; ninth and tenth floors the general inspectorate: and eleventh floor the specialist inspectorate.
The building has three conference rooms and will be partly air-conditioned.
"Upon review and discussion of your commercial building in Hong Kong, it is our feeling that this build- NEW BUILDING FOR GARDEN ROAD CHURCH ing is constructed by methods very similar to those used in the United States for large commercial buildings. Even the equipment, the cranes and the hoists are very similar to what we use here. The only difference is your bamboo scaffolding which I am sure will amaze us for the rest of our lives.
"I am setting up a meeting with the State of Cali- fornia Department of Industrial Safety which controls safety orders for construction.
I intend to show
all of the detailed slides that our group took in regard to these bamboo scaffoldings and just perhaps from this meeting, we will try and completely change the scaffold- ing methods used in the United States to conform more to the scaffolding methods used in Hong Kong. Perhaps that is reaching back thousands of years but I am con- vinced that your 3 ft. module is a better system than our 10 ft. module now being used."
$1.5M BUILDING FOR MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
The new 12-storey headquarters for Singapore's Ministry of Education will go up in Kay Siang Road.
The building, estimated to cost $1.5 million, is expected to be completed in 1968 and will replace the present inadequate and out-of-date Ministry buildings in the same place, which are to be demolished.
Earthworks for the new complex have begun and construction will begin early in 1967.
The Minister for Education, Mr. Ong Pang Boon, recently said that a start had not been made earlier on the new headquarters because the Government felt that the school-building programme should come first but that,
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Artist's impression of the new 12-storey central building for the Singapore Ministry of Education
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Photograph above is of a model of the new St. Joseph's R.C. Church (to be built on the site of the old) in Garden Road, Hong Kong. The Main Contractor is expected to be appointed this month and work will start at once; it is hoped to have the church opened in time for Christmas 1967. The Architect is P. K. Ng
JAPAN WINS DAM CONTRACT IN TAIWAN
Toshio Hashimoto, managing director of Japan's Nihon Koei, announced in Tokyo recently that his company had been chosen by the Taiwanese government to survey and design the huge multipurpose Tseng Wen Reservoir in Taiwan.
He said that the reservoir will irrigate 85,000 hectares of farm land and double agricultural production in the It will be built on the upper stream of the Tseng Wen River in central Taiwan and provide irrigation. power, flood control and domestic water.
area.
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The Tseng Wen Reservoir will have the largest rock- fill dam in the Orient when it is completed in 1972. will be 136.5 metres high and 440 metres long and have water storage capacity of 890 million tons. Annual energy output will be 256 million kwh. from two 50,000-kw. generating units.
Nihon Koei is one of Japan's largest engineering companies. Hashimoto said that as soon as a construc- tion contract is signed, the company will send 20 engineers to Taiwan and invite about 120 Chinese technicians to Japan for training.
Far East Architect & Builder January, 1967
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