Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1966-1967 — Page 39

MARINE DEPARTMENT LIBRARY

An example of this is a seven storey building containing 840 rooms which was one of the first to be constructed at the Lei Cheng Uk Estate. It was finished about eight weeks after piling had been completed. By the end of the first financial year in which permanent resettlement build- ings were planned and constructed, seventeen blocks of six or seven storeys, containing in all 8,508 rooms were completed, and plans for building an additional twenty-five blocks containing 12,698 rooms were well advanced.

74. Each wing of the first type of block is divided structurally into a series of bays, 10 feet wide and about 25 feet deep. Originally these bays were sub-divided by partitions down the centre line which resulted in rooms of about 120 square feet (12 feet 6 inches × 9 feet 6 inches) which is still the standard size of room in the Mark I and II estates. Ventilation is afforded by a door and large window which open on to the communal balcony that runs all round the buildings, and also by openings in the common partitions at the back of each room. Govern- ment decided in 1954 that these rooms should accommodate five adults (two children under 10 counting as one adult), at a density of 24 square feet per adult. This was not an easy decision to take; but bearing in mind the very large number of people who had to be resettled following the Shek Kip Mei fire and ever since, the heavy public expenditure involved, the need to keep rents down to the minimum, and the high densities in existing private domestic accommodation, not to speak of the squatter huts which were being replaced, it seemed necessary and justifiable in the context of emergency housing.

75. Experience soon showed that not only were there many families who numbered more or less than five, but also that by adjusting the positioning of the partitions in some of the bays, considerable flexibility could be achieved in providing different sizes of room. For example, a full-bay could be turned into one larger room of 152 square feet and a smaller one of 86 square feet, while the standard basic room of 120 square feet could be partitioned or sub-divided to make smaller rooms for childless couples or for two or three individuals who were willing to live together. The result is that there are now in the old estates many different sizes of room, varying between 60 and 360 square feet (the latter being a special design of self-contained flat with its own kitchen, lavatory, shower and private balcony).

76. These old designs were abandoned a few years ago, and early in 1964 the Architectural Office completed the first blocks of a new

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