A home you can buy for US$15,000? It’s not a pipe dream in world's priciest real estate market, Hong Kong
Architectural firm James Law Cybertecture has come up with a novel idea to help with the city’s housing problems: concrete water pipes. They are mass produced, well insulated and durable, and can be converted at low cost
With all the debate on shrinking micro flats, and whether shipping container living is a good idea, one option for affordable housing – already in plentiful supply in Hong Kong – is being overlooked.
That is the opinion of architect James Law, founder of James Law Cybertecture, whose outside-the-box thinking has led to a possible solution. According to Law, the physical properties of the humble concrete water pipe – a network of which criss-crosses Hong Kong metres below the ground – make a perfect starting point for their conversion to low-cost, modular micro-housing.
Law will unveil the prototype of his O-Pod Pipe House in December, and put it on public display after that.
Law’s first experiment with compartmentalised concepts to ease Hong Kong’s housing crisis was the 2015 AlPod, a container-sized mobile pod house with flexible living/working space, bathroom and kitchen. Made of aluminium, it was lightweight and “designed to be a prototype for a new kind of modular, mid-rise residential tower, which could be built off-site in a factory and then plugged in to the structure of the building”.
It was comparatively spacious (at 450 sq ft), and quite luxurious. But it was expensive (US$64,000).
Cheap Hong Kong-designed ‘container homes’ the way of the future
For his second attempt, Law began from the premise of affordability.