Thursday 9 December 2010

Delving Brick Lane’s Layers

Early on a Friday morning, London’s Brick Lane bustles with Bangladeshis heading to prayers at the local mosque. The women wear brightly coloured saris and the men don long pastel robes, looking striking as they stride along this worn English street.
A few hours later, they are gone and the feel of the street has completely changed. Now it is busy with hipsters with slicked over retro haircuts and skinny jeans. Like the stars of alternative music videos, people lounge on benches outside cafes dragging at roll ups and drinking cans of beer.
These are just two of the many different scenes that are staged every day on Brick Lane. The long, narrow London road gained its name because it was used to transport bricks from the outskirts of the city to building projects in the centre. It now sits hemmed in between some of London’s poorest neighborhoods and the sleek skyscrapers of the City, London’s financial district, from which it couldn’t be more different.
For me, Brick Lane epitomizes that mingling of different cultures and rich multilayered history that make London so special. Other cities claim to be very multicultural, but the way London mixes tastes and traditions feels different. Hong Kong has residents who hail from different countries — but they remain somewhat segregated. In London, a huge variety of people knock up against each other every day.
London’s development has also been distinctive. Instead of new buildings occupying greenfield sites, or replacing old ones outright, you get developments that build upon what’s beneath. History piles on top of history, like layers of fallen leaves. Brick Lane has witnessed a particularly impressive number of these strata. As the artists Gilbert and George, who live just off the street, once said, Brick Lane has been (and seen) “everything”.

The first group to make their mark in Shoreditch, the area around Brick Lane, were the Huguenots, French Protestants who settled the area in the early seventeenth century after fleeing religious persecution. They used their weaving skills to prosper in London, establishing the district as a centre of clothing manufacture. They used their newfound wealth to build impressive churches in Shoreditch — as well as its first brick townhouses, in solid and robust styles that still endure today.
After the Huguenots came scores of Jews, fleeing the Anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia, and, later, other parts of Europe. These refugees were mostly very poor. They subdivided the grand Huguenot townhouses into separate cramped units and there are many accounts of the squalid conditions they lived in. An engraving on a stone archway of a building near to Brick Lane records its former use as a ‘Soup Kitchen For The Jewish Poor’.
The Jewish community set up businesses making boots and cabinets, turning Brick Lane into a district for crafts and expanding the local markets. Today their influence is still present in a couple of Jewish bakeries on Brick Lane, selling twisted pastries. Two famous shops at one end of the road churn out freshly baked bagels stuffed with plump slices of smoked meat.
The Jews of Brick Lane, too, gradually became wealthier, and most moved on to other parts of London, such as Golders Green. It’s a pattern that’s repeated itself in the area; a migrant group arrives, poor and persecuted, suffuses the lane with its culture and gradually establishes itself, growing rich, and then moving out of the area to some other part of London.
The Bangladeshis were the next wave of settlers. They first began settling here while working as ‘lascar’ seamen for the British Empire, as they had in Hong Kong, giving the name to that city’s Upper Lascar Row. Increasing numbers have come ever since, and Brick Lane is one of the primary points of arrival for Bangladeshi immigrants in London, a point underscored by Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane, which probes the lives of an immigrant family who live there.
The large numbers of Bangladeshis living around Brick Lane have given the area its nickname: “Banglatown”. They’ve also added their own distinctive spice to the area; one part of the lane is crowded with Indian sweet shops, huge metal trays in their windows pilled high with the sticky twists of jalebi and basins in which gulab jamon swim in syrup.
As dusk sets in, portions of the lane glow with the neon signs of curry houses. Touts hang outside each one, trying to coax in those who pass. Bollywood music rattles out from the doorways of small grocery stores. During the day, women wearing full burkas wander the streets shopping. Halfway along the lane is a building which began life as Huguenot church, then became a synagogue. Now it is a busy mosque that sounds the call to prayer each day.
But the Bangladeshis aren’t the latest group to have moved to Brick Lane. More recently, it has become the adopted home of a huge number of artists and creative types. Some of the first artists to move here included Gilbert and George, followed by Tracey Emin. They came largely because the area’s rough image meant rents were cheap – just £16 a month when Gilbert and George first moved in.
Since then the area’s gentrification and increasing cool has pushed rents up a lot, but its cultural vibrancy means it still appeals to the creative class, and numerous design studios and galleries are now dotted around. The new crowd contrast greatly with the Bangladeshi population that still dominates the lane, but one thing they do share is a bubbling desire to prove themselves. They’ve continued the neighborhood’s tradition of vitality and dynamism.
A walk down the main section of Brick Lane reveals an amazing array of street art. The face of a man has been carved out of the plaster on one wall. A pair of luminous pink aliens stand in recessed doorway holding hands. A huge, detailed drawing of a bird stretches across the end of a row of terraces. The art is giving the street’s rundown buildings a new vibrancy.
This creativity isn’t restricted to Brick Lane’s walls. It’s also there in the way the new creative set dresses and acts. In the evenings, Brick Lane now fills with people in bold alternative fashions – from flowery retro dresses to three quarter length trousers and doc-martin boots. Art is mingling with life, giving definition to people’s characters and to the urban space around it.
Like each influx before them, the artists are making their own mark on Brick Lane. Each community has come and laid down aspects of their own culture on the street, so that Brick Lane now overflows with their interwoven tapestry, a unique atmosphere.

Real-Life SimCity

The aroma of wood smoke is not one of the things I expected to smell when I moved to a new apartment on the 35th floor, but there’s a rooftop barbecue restaurant just down the street from my building and the smell often floats upwards. When I sit on my balcony, I can watch little clumps of people around the fires, grilling fishballs and pork chops.

In Montreal, I always thought it was better to be close to the street. Why sequester yourself in a high-rise, buffeted by northern winds, when you could be close to neighbours and the street and your local dep, which is always well-stocked with beer? As much as I could appreciate a good view, being able to watch alley cats make their nightly inspections seemed somehow more important.

In too many parts of Hong Kong, though, proximity to the street does not confer many real pleasures. The traffic is noisier, the pollution more irritating, the sunlight so very fleeting. In the absence of a true convivial streetlife, life on a low floor is not a matter of engagement with your surroundings, just a feat of endurance.

It’s a voyeur’s life on the 35th floor. At eye level, there is a view that sweeps from Lion’s Rock to the blinking lights of Wan Chai. If I look down, I can peer into the maze of rooftops below: makeshift houses, gardens, empty spaces. One roof is home to a dog who spends the day pacing between drying laundry and potted plants. Beyond that, I can watch ant-sized people waiting for buses, crossing the street, buying fruit from the hawker at the corner of Portland and Arran.
It makes me think of playing SimCity 4 and zooming down to street level, where you can watch the Sims going about their daily lives. The difference, of course, is that I’m just an elevator ride away from being one of those Sims myself.
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Wednesday 8 December 2010

Classroom Interior Design



Classroom at Gloucestershire College showing how learning technologies are embedded into the room to support, enhance and enrich learning.

The Other Side of Hong Kong Nightlife

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Nobody really remembers how they first discovered Sense 99. Usually, they hear about it through a friend, who heard about it through a friend, who heard about it through a friend and so on. It is not quite a bar, not quite a private club, not an art gallery or a music venue, but it combines elements of all of these. To get there, you must make your way down Wellington Street, past the green-painted stalls of Hong Kong’s oldest street market, until you arrive in front of a worn metal door at the base of an old stone shophouse. Press the second doorbell from the top and a tinny voice will greet you through a speaker in the door.

“Way?”
There is no secret password. Say pretty much anything and you will be greeted by a loud buzz. The door unlocks. Head up to the second floor, towards the sound of conversation and live music, until you enter a room that appears not to have been touched since the early colonial days of Hong Kong: green-and-white tile floors, wood windowframes, French doors opening onto a narrow balcony. There is a small bar on the right and a collection of stylishly mismatched furniture on the left. Upstairs, another balcony and a lounge where musicians bring their instruments and jam until the early hours of the morning.
This is not a typical Hong Kong bar.


Sense 99
“If most Hong Kong people came across this space, the first thing they would do is ask, ‘How should I renovate it?’” says Sense’s owner, Rupert Wong, better known by his Chinese nickname, Ah Shek. Dressed in a dark blue sweater with jeans, black-framed glasses and a baseball cap, Ah Shek looks at least a decade younger than his 48 years. “I don’t care about that. This place isn’t about decor, it’s not about drinks. It’s about having a space where people can come together.”

And that is exactly what they do every Friday and Saturday night, when Sense is open until the sun struggles over the horizon and the last customers stagger home. The crowd is diverse — artists, musicians, students and self-styled creative types. There is usually the odd group of bankers, sleeves rolled up on their pin-striped shirts, looking a bit out of place, like puppies lost in the bush. “Everyone is welcome,” says Ah Shek, sipping a glass of straight whiskey. “It has a very natural, self-regulating atmosphere. It feels like it has no rules, but everybody gets each other.”
Temple Street, 10.40pm

Hong Kong has always been awash in booze, a legacy of its history as a British-controlled free port, but its drinking spots have always had a certain mercenary quality: your cash (and plenty of it) in exchange for alcohol. Places with a soul, a purpose higher than the simple dispensation of liquor, have been few and far between. But that might be changing. Over the past few years, a new generation of creative nightspots have joined the established havens of counter-culture. They are antidotes to the grubby girly bars of Wan Chai and the cookie-cutter drinking holes of Lan Kwai Fong, places that capture a part of Hong Kong’s cultural zeitgeist — places to get away from the relentlessly commercial pace of life that characterizes so much of the city.

In the drizzly grey aftermath of a typhoon last October, I wander down a back lane in an industrial part of Kwun Tong. Burly factory buildings rise on either side of me. Standing up ahead is Kimi Lam, the manager of Hidden Agenda, an indie music venue located on the sixth floor of an industrial building. Lam is 23, with tattooed arms and a pugnacious build, but she is friendly and expressive. She apologies for being tired. “We’ve been moving these all day,” she says, pointing to a yellow bench her friends are loading into a cargo lift. “The jazz festival gave them to us. We got 45 of them. They were just going to throw them away!”

Thrift is a virtue when you are running a livehouse. Since its inception in 2009, Hidden Agenda has brought dozens of international acts into Hong Kong, with several shows every week and some of the lowest ticket prices in town — a deliberate strategy to make Hidden Agenda as accessible as possible. “In Hong Kong, we’ve got a lot of different concert halls, but they’re too big, they have seats, and they cost tens of thousands of dollars to rent,” says Lam. She and her friends have spent a lot of time in mainland China, where venues like Beijing’s D22 and Mao Livehouse support a thriving music scene. “We realized, if we have our own space, we could bring in a lot of bands.”

Space was easy to find. Hong Kong was once filled with factories making cheap clothes, plastic flowers and toys, nearly all of which have left for cheap land and low wages in mainland China. As a result, entire industrial neighbourhoods are now half-empty, and they are being colonized by visual artists, performers, design studios and architects. In Kwun Tong, hundreds of amateur bands use old industrial space to rehearse.

Moving upstairs, Lam takes me around Hidden Agenda’s 4,000-square-foot space. The ceilings are low and concrete pillars block some views of the stage, but the walls are decorated with murals by local street artists, the fridge is well-stocked with Tsingtao beer and the stage was recently expanded. Kimi, who first got into music in primary school when her brother gave her a Radiohead CD, has eclectic musical taste, something reflected in Hidden Agenda’s lineup: one night might be Swedish dream-pop duo JJ, the next Chinese-Japanese rockers Lee Su Fu Connection.

“They’re crazy, rebellious young people,” says musician and performance artist Kung Chi-shing. “It comes down to having a vision, an attitude that goes beyond making a profit.” Kung got to know the Hidden Agenda crew after he started organizing Street Music, a free outdoor concert held every month in a small plaza next to the Hong Kong Arts Centre. Since it began just over two years ago, Street Music has attracted a loyal crowd of followers who come for the mix of local and international musicians from every genre imaginable. “There’s a group of people who come every time and bring an ice bucket with sparkling wine,” says Kung.
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Street Music Series
Kung and I meet over a drink at his favourite watering hole, Club 71, a low-key spot tucked inside a leafy back alley in Central. The interior walls are covered in a brightly-coloured mural; in the laneway outside, old men play cards until the evening, when they are gradually replaced by drinkers. A black-and-white cat meanders indifferently between the legs of some bar stools. Kung takes a gulp of house red. He has a bohemian air about him, with long grey hair, clear-framed glasses and a braided goatee. Since returning to Hong Kong in 2005, after living for a decade in New York, he has been a mainstay in the city’s music scene, tirelessly organizing outdoor concerts and cultural events. “People ask me why I don’t take a break, even when it’s so hot in the summer,” he says. “But if you don’t have a regular spot, if you aren’t always there, the impact is limited.”

That kind of consistency is rare in Hong Kong, where bars, restaurants and entire creative movements are extinguished almost as soon as they flare up. Club 71, named after a huge pro-democracy march in 2003, is the successor to Club 64, a larger bar that opened just after the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989 — a traumatizing event for Hongkongers. Throughout the 1990s, 64 was a haven for Hong Kong artists, musicians and left-wing political activists like Leung Kwok-hung, better known as Cheung Mo — “Long Hair” — who is now a rabble-rousing member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council.

1997 was another creative oasis that existed in the early days of Lan Kwai Fong, before it was taken over by chain bars. “What made 1997 unique was the personal warmth of the people who owned it. If you had an idea for an event or art venture, you could go to Christian Rhomberg and Nichole Garnaut” — the owners — “and they’d listen,” says one of the bar’s regulars, Liam Fitzpatrick, who is now a senior editor with TIME Asia. “Usually they gave you creative license to do what you wanted – either by lending you their venue or by helping you with sponsorship or putting you in touch with the right people or whatever. They must have mentored an entire generation of promoters, stylists and designers in that way.”

Otherwise, “the scene was hopeless,” says Fitzpatrick. “There were fake Tudor pubs, karaoke lounges, Wanchai girly bars or the tiny smattering of places in Lan Kwai Fong – take your pick.” So he and some friends started running raves in a rice warehouse in Western District. “Until we were shut down a few months later, we were having thousands of people in there every weekend – everyone from school leavers to socialite heavies to genuine celebs. Kylie Minogue showed up one night. Michael Hutchence came.”

Everyone has memories of dearly-departed nightspots. When I meet with Ah Shek at Sense 99, he places an envelope on the table and pulled out a stack of photos taken in 1999. “This was Oil Street,” he says, referring to an abandoned government supply depot that was occupied by artists for a year. Many now speak of the time in reverential tones: there were impromptu performances, wild exhibitions and a general sense of camaraderie and creative fervor. “And there was a bar,” says Ah Shek with a grin, pointing at a photo of a well-stocked wood bar. An old television sits on one end of the old bar; it survives at Sense, where it now functions as a fish tank.

Like so many other creative ventures in Hong Kong, Oil Street was shut down by the government, which intended to sell the supply depot to a hotel developer. (The sale later fell through and the site is still vacant.) 1997 is just a shadow of its former self; Club 64 fell victim to high rents. Hidden Agenda recently announced that it must find a new home when its lease ends in February. And most Hong Kong bars are still as bland as they were when Fitzpatrick threw his warehouse parties in the early 1990s. The cycle can seem vicious and endless. Because rents are so high, business owners need investors, and those investors are unwilling to take big risks if it means cutting into potential profits. “You see people opening up a new club or restaurant every week and the depressing thing is, they’re all going for the same aesthetic,” says Cassady Winston, better known as DJ Enso, whose diverse range of influences have earned him acclaim as one of Hong Kong’s best DJs. “I don’t know how you could look yourself in the eye if you’re doing the same thing as everyone else.”

But history is not always doomed to repeat itself. When I ask him if the spirit of 1997 lives on today, Liam Fitzpatrick says, “Sometimes I find myself walking down some obscure alley in Sheung Wan or NoHo or Western, and seeing the lights of a single bar or café up ahead, and maybe a gallery or a boutique, and there are a couple of hipsters sitting on a step drinking beer out of bottles in the cool evening air and everything is very quiet and undiscovered and cool – that’s what the original Lan Kwai Fong was like.”

Recently, no shortage of unusual ventures have emerged in those obscure alleys. There’s Visage One, a tiny barbershop that hosts raucous jazz sessions publicized only by word of mouth. Les Boules is a lofty basement pétanque bar opened by a Frenchman who wanted a place to play balls and drink pastis. In October, the design space Konzepp opened a casual nighttime social club where friends can gather over a bottle of wine. Another design space, the Wan Chai Visual Archive, took a similar step by opening a quirky back-street bar, Tai Lung Fung, named after a 1960s Cantonese opera troupe.

What all of these places have in common is that they place more emphasis on cultivating a sense of community than on generating a profit. Last spring, after throwing a New Year’s Eve party at Hidden Agenda, Enso was so inspired by the venue’s do-it-yourself ethos that he decided to open his own space. The result is XXX Gallery, a club and exhibition space located in a former bank vault four floors underground. Every week features some of Hong Kong’s best DJs, like Alok and Yao, and US- and UK-influenced sounds that range from bassline to dubstep and juke.

When he first came to Hong Kong from San Francisco in 2007, Enso found himself disappointed with Hong Kong’s club scene. “I figured there would eb some really cool stuff going on here because of the influence of the UK and China, but 99 percent of stuff was really mainstream,” he says. So he and some DJ friends started throwing a series of electro parties called Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy, which “recontextualized” hip hop and pop songs. They brought it big names like A-Trak and Major Lazer. Now, says Enso, “the scene has changed. It’s stretched out and gotten more diverse.”

That’s something that becomes abundantly clear at XXX. On a Thursday night last October, the gallery was the venue for a collaboration between American experimental hip-hop composer DJ Spooky and the classical Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. As the audience leaned back in black sofas, bathed in ultraviolent light, Spooky and the ensemble played pieces from Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, an audio exploration of the Antarctic. “This is like a living room session,” said Spooky. “It’s an unusual night. I wish you guys had pillows.”

How Tall is Too Tall?

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Dubai. Photo by Zeyad T. Al-Mudhaf
The Burj Khalifa defies the imagination. It stands nearly one kilometre above the streets of Dubai, spanning a total of 163 floors — 209 if you could the maintenance levels in the building’s spire. When it was completed in 2010, at a cost of more than US$1.5 billion, it was by far the world’s tallest building and almost certainly its most extravagant.

That extravagance was made all the more apparent by the economic turmoil that shook the world just before the Burj was set to open. Dubai was on the verge of bankruptcy, saved only by a US$10 billion bailout from the ruler of nearby Abu Dhabi, for whom the Burj was ultimately named. With most floors standing vacant and maintenance costs as dizzyingly high as the building itself — it takes a full four months just to clean the windows — the Burj revived long-standing questions about the sustainability of super-tall skyscrapers.

Those questions are especially relevant in Asia, where seven of the world’s ten tallest buildings can be found. Another 30 buildings taller than 300 metres — generally considered the limit between an ordinary high-rise and a “super-tall” — are now under construction in South Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand and India.

“It’s an ego thing,” says co-founder of Singapore’s WOHA Architects, Richard Hassell. “I think a lot of the developers themselves have a ‘mine’s bigger and better than yours’ mentality. I think cheap energy was bad for architecture because people could basically make any kind of building comfortable, and that freed up the building to be anything they wanted it to be, so architecture’s become a bit lost in gratuitous form-making. The Dubai ‘look-at-me’ architecture. It’s a bit of a dead end.”

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International Commerce Centre, Hong Kong
But extravagantly tall buildings do have their advantages. “There’s good vanity and useless vanity,” says Paul Katz, director of Kohn Pedersen Fox, which has designed many of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, including the Shanghai World Financial Center, the recently-completed International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong and the Ping An International Finance Center in Shenzhen, which will be the world’s second-tallest building when it is completed in 2014.

Well-designed skyscrapers can be extremely efficient, says Katz, because the density they create reduces the energy needed to house and transport large masses of people. “I think the real problem in the world right now is sprawl, not density,” he says. “We need to look at how to have tall buildings without creating too much waste.”

A key to doing that is to ensure that super-tall skyscrapers anchor a cluster of other high-rises, all of them linked to a well-developed public transportation network. Adaptability is another essential ingredient. “Buildings that are too idiosyncratic make it hard to adapt to other uses,” says Katz. “Many of the tall buildings in New York have seen their uses change many times over the past hundred years,” such as the Woolworths Building, once the world’s tallest, which was a corporate headquarters when it opened in 1910 and is now home to a mix of educational institutions, offices and apartments.

Other architects are exploring even more innovative ways of making skyscrapers sustainable. MAD Office founder Ma Yansong, who recently designed the 358-metre Sinosteel International Plaza in Tianjin, is now working on Urban Forest, a 385-metre mixed-use tower that incorporates gardens on every floor, as a way to humanize a form that has traditionally been driven by technology.

“Whoever can build taller has mastered the technology and has the most money,” he says. “We can already go to the moon, so what’s special about a high-rise? Eventually it becomes a competition with no meaning. There’s nothing there, only the height.”
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Urban Forest, Chongqing
For all the criticism levied at buildings like the Burj Khalifa, however, there is still a symbolic power attached to structures of great height. When the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed by terrorists on September 11th, 2001, a decision was eventually made to replace it with an even taller building. The new One World Trade Center will open next year at a height of 541 metres — or 1,776 feet, a representation of the year the United States declared its independence as a nation.

Shortly after September 11th, Paul Katz was asked by a Newsweek reporter whether the attacks marked the end of the skyscraper era. “I told them that in ten years we’d be seeing taller buildings than ever before,” he recalls. “I said that more out of hubris than certainty, but in hindsight I was right.”

Defect Rectification

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Hong Kong’s HK$5.5 billion new government headquarters is falling apart just three months after it opened
 
 
 Crooked wall fixtures, chipped railings, torn wallpaper, stained walls and signboards held up by masking tape in the Legislative Council: the recent outbreak of legionnaire’s disease is not the only problem at the Hong Kong government’s expensive new headquarters.

Three months after lawmakers moved into the Legco complex, they are still confronted daily by a long list of flaws in the building. This came after the legionnaires’ disease bacteria was found in the water at the dining hall of the Legco building and many other locations in the government offices next door.

“The electric cables for a switch near to my office on the sixth floor have remained exposed since I moved in,” said Wong Kwok-lin, a Federation of Trade Unions lawmaker. “I never dare to touch it as I don’t know whether or not it’s getting electricity.”

Photos posted this week on Facebook highlight shoddy workmanship inside the complex, which is located on the site of the former Tamar naval base. In one photo, an alarm button and handicapped door-opening button are fixed to the wall at haphazard angles. In another, the sign for the Steward and Catering Services Office is attached to the wall with masking tape.

Lawmakers and visitors to the complex complain that stone walls are stained by paint and water, the wood railings inside lifts are heavily chipped, wallpaper is torn inside conference rooms, wall panels rattle when lift buttons are pressed and floors wobble and creak underfoot. Water fountains have been sheathed in plastic, possibly due to concerns about legionnaire’s disease.

Yesterday afternoon, the toilets’ salt water supply was abruptly suspended due to “emergency repair,” forcing building occupants to flush toilets with water from the sinks. No explanation was given.

“It almost seems as if it is a very worn-out building, but it’s not, it’s new,” said Civic Party councillor Audrey Eu Yuet-mee. “Once, one of the ceiling fixtures fell off when I was passing by. Luckily it didn’t fall on my head.”


Eu said the complex has been undergoing repairs since the day it opened. She still encounters problems on a daily basis, like the malfunctioning thermostat in her office, which does not allow air conditioning to be turned off or changed from 19 degrees Celsius.

“Every day, there are lots of workmen around fixing things,” said Eu. “We paid more than five billion dollars for all of this. Why do we have to deal with these problems?”

“The contractor and the administration have cut corners in workmanship and choice of material to meet the deadline and budget, which is extremely disappointing,” said Designing Hong Kong member Paul Zimmerman, who posted the photos on Facebook. “Obviously they prefer shortcuts over facing Legco and the community with requests for more money and more time.”

The Tamar complex was built by a Gammon-Hip Hing joint venture, which was awarded a HK$5.5 billion design-and-build contract in 2008. Last July, construction managers said the project was running behind schedule and warned that the government’s relocation could be delayed. Construction workers said they were rushing to open the new buildings in time for the first Legislative Council session in October.

The discovery last month of legionnaire’s bacteria in the water supply raised questions about whether contractors cut corners in order to open the complex on time. The government and Gammon-Hip Hing have denied any compromises were made in the building’s construction.

Zimmerman’s photos were greeted by cynical comments on Facebook.

“Sounds like a nightmare building,” wrote one user.

“Never confuse a building with a hole in it for openness in government,” wrote another.

Visitors have also been critical. “It looks like it was bashed up in two days in order to get completed,” said cycling activist Martin Turner, who noticed crooked fittings and poorly-installed wall panels on a recent visit.

The government is adamant that none of this is out of the ordinary. “It is normal for defect rectification and adjustments works to be carried out during the initial phase of moving in,” said a spokesman. “[The Architectural Services Department] has urged and will continue to urge the contractor to complete the remedial works as soon as possible. According to the terms of contract, the contractor shall be responsible for remedial works and follow up on all defective items during the maintenance period.”

“We will not accept works that are not in compliance with the established requirements and/or safety standards,” said the spokesman.

Six official complaints about workmanship at the new government headquarters have been received since the complex opened.

Ceiling Design and Decoration of The Blue Mosque Istanbul


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Amazing Home Design in London Harisson Varma


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