Hoi Ying Estate and Hoi Tat Estate | Architecture x Aesthetics | Hong Kong Housing Authority and Housing Department

As you travel along the West Kowloon Highway near Sham Shui Po, you will be impressed by the longest pedestrian footbridge between two public housing estates. This footbridge spans approximately 145 meters in length and 6 meters in width, crossing the busy West Kowloon Highway and Lin Cheung Road, which is comprised of 16 lanes of vehicular traffic, as well as three railway lines, including the Tung Chung Line, Airport Express Line, and West Rail Line. Its elegant design blends harmoniously with the surrounding environment while significantly shortening the distance for residents walking to the Cheung Sha Wan waterfront area. This has greatly improved the quality of life and transportation for the residents of Hoi Tat Estate and Hoi Ying Estate. This long span footbridge, resembling the legendary Magpie Bridge, connects the two sides of the estates and operates all year round, allowing residents to travel freely without waiting for the Chinese Valentine's Day, Qixi Festival.

In addition to admiring the magnificent footbridge, you can also enter the rich cultural environment of Sham Shui Po Leisure & Cultural Centre from the footbridge. The building's exterior design is modeled after stacked books, boasting a unique architectural style. The interior design of the library is also very stylish, with a staircase connecting the ground floor and the first floor featuring light-colored wooden steps that add to the comfortable atmosphere. The platform garden of the building is also a good place to take photos, with a bench in the middle of an artistically manicured lawn. In the evening, you can lean back on the bench and watch the stars. The building also houses various recreational and cultural facilities to make community life more colourful.

Features

Innovative Bridge Construction

Due to the main roads having to remain operational, the bridge construction posed an extremely high level of difficulty. We overcame many challenges by adopting innovative bridge design and construction methods - by assembling the two halves of the footbridge with vertical support by temporary launching towers at each side of Hoi Ying Estate and Hoi Tat Estate, followed by lowering for connection in the middle (see the connecting joint as demarcated on footbridge deck). Besides, we adopted Building Information Modeling and 3D Laser Scanning to control each construction stage in enhanced level of precision.

Community Integration

The design of Sham Shui Po Leisure and Cultural Centre is ingenious. The rooftop garden can be accessed through outdoor stairs or elevators and is connected to the long-span footbridge, thereby extending the flow of people from the ground to the waterfront and promoting the integration of the Sham Shui Po community.

Old Meets New

In order to showcase the unique history of reclamation, we took the ever-changing coastline of Cheung Sha Wan as the theme of the landscape design and added special design elements such as boat-shaped seats to the ample green open space, and set up the design with the participation of students in the area, symbolizing a work of art that fuses and connects.

Flourishing Community

We work with government departments to plan and develop a variety of recreational and cultural facilities in the project. They include a multi-purpose arena (which can serve as basketball courts, volleyball courts, badminton courts or a handball court and be flexibly converted into a venue for community activities with a seating capacity of about thousands of people), a table tennis room, a fitness room, a children's play room, and three multi-purpose activity rooms.