The Fai Chi Kei social housing project is an investigation of the role of a single building in the broader context of a high-density city, of the role of public space within the plot, and the role of the common areas in the overall economy of the project. It is an exercise in the orderly stacking of over 700 apartments and the definition of a vertical neighborhood.
The high density of programs applied for public housing projects make it difficult to manage a sequence of urban spaces at ground level from the public to the private.
The podium and tower scheme – which shifts the public space to a 2nd or 3rd floor level making it no longer accessible to passers-by – is the typology adopted almost universally in Macau and Hong Kong.