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CCUPYING a whole city block in the commercial heart of the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Kowloon, the massive J. Hotung Building is a composite development providing shopping arcades, offices and Euro- pean type apartments.

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The 17-storey building covers rectangular site bounded by Hankow Road, Peking Road, Ashley Road and Middle Road. From each frontage there is entry to the shopping arcades which are on the ground and first floors. These arcades are linked by two escalators and three lifts.

The three lifts also serve the office premises which are on the second, third and fourth floors.

Floors from the fifth to the sixteenth contain a total of 238 apartments of one, two and three bedrooms. The flats range from 400 sq. ft. to 800 sq. ft. in floor area.

Standard pro-

visions include, living room, dining room, bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, servant's room and servant's wash- room. Each apartment floor is served by six elevators and three refuse chutes which take rubbish to a disposal unit in the basement.

The mixture of domestic flats of various sizes, offices and shops all under one roof, and the client's re- quirement that the site should take up the maximum allowable development under the Building Regulation, pre- sented the architect with extremely complicated technical and planning problems.

Setbacks Avoided

The different widths of the sur- rounding streets, each with different set back requirements, posed another difficulty in the consideration of mass-

ing and proportion of the building's exterior design.

Despite the many stipulations, the architect has managed to avoid ter- raced setbacks on the structure and to maintain the fine points of each type of function without losing bal- ance from the design of the building as a whole.

Shops and offices form a strong podium up to fifth floor level, from which the apartments rise a further 12 storeys in four rectangular tower blocks.

A feature of the building is the provision of a service floor of 6 ft. height between the domestic towers of the building and the non-domestic portion from the fifth floor down. The space provided at this floor allows all staircases, pipings, drainage, etc. of the domestic towers to divert and group together into desirable positions

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SECOND FLOOR PLAN

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Far East Architect & Builder March, 1968