HONG KONG
VERTICAL URBAN FACTORY THE CONTEMPORARY FACTORY FLEXIBLE FACTORY
VARIOUS, 2013
the extracts from the spent grain to make wort. This occurs by mixing hot water and malt into another vessel with a filter. With this step, a boiling process sterilizes the wort and the brewer adds hops, which provide the bitter flavor. Then, the liquid is cooled in a heat exchanger. The fermentation and maturation achieved through the addition of yeast gives a particular beer its character. This fermentation occurs in cylindrical vats with a conical base so that the waste material separates and falls down using the vertical flow of the tanks, which are often placed on the exterior
of the brewery. At Steam Whistle, the vats are housed inside the facility; the compactness of this production flow allows for a more densely packed urban site. The process continues with chilling the beer, carbonating it, and putting it through a final filtration to remove impurities and to form a smoother consistency. The beer is then removed from the large stainless steel vats and packaged into bottles, cans, or kegs, and then labeled and packaged for distribution. To promote tourism and experiential consumption, and to leverage its unique manufacturing setting, Steam Whistle has opened its factory to tastings and tours. To expedite such tourism, the company has modified its factory space by adding a catwalk through the main hall. This broad shift illustrates that the industrial process is no longer dirty or unpleasant; on the contrary, through sanitary regulations and new technology, it has become a a part of the city, reknitting the formerly lost space of production back into the place of the product’s consumption, and thus daily life.
FINISHED GOODS IN PROCESS MATERIAL RAW MATERIALS VISITOR CIRCULATION
Y Beer processing at Steam Whistle, Toronto, 2014
After a massive fire in Shek Kip Mei left 53,000 homeless over Christmas in 1953, the government responded by building what they called Mark I housing as H-shaped, low-income tenements without many services and balconies surround the buildings which were also used as cooking areas. When they found that people were also using the spaces to make goods, the city produced single-use manufacturing buildings for light industries. They identified these as “flatted factories,” meaning that each floor can be leased as a flat, or a combination of flats according to the space required (not dissimilar to a loft space). The concrete frame buildings were modeled on the second phase of the city’s housing program from the early 1960s, during which they built seven-story H-shaped buildings with units available to lease ranging from 18 to 24 square meters, a module set according to the structural grid. In these spaces, one could find a hybrid mix of products stemming from the previous cottage industries of textiles and plastic flowers. One of the oldest of these types that still exists is the Chai-Wan factory built in 1959. Organized in an H-shape with five stories and balconies surrounding the floors for light and air, the structural columns are placed four meters apart to carry 836-square-meters per floor. For vertical circulation, workers use a central ramp as a gravity system to move goods, as in early-twentieth-century factories. One staircase in the middle and another at each end of the parallel wings are linked by a corridor with public services, resulting in the H formation. For other enterprises, either too large or polluting, the city decided to develop larger vertical urban factories in a second phase of government-led industrial development. Some of these rising over twenty stories, with the inclusion of elevators, waste management, and storage. The rise in height of factories coincided with zoning changes in the 1960s — up to a Floor Area Ratio (FAR) of 15 — that allowed buildings to go taller if they could increase the light and air by using podiums, which often contained commercial
X Vertical Urban Factory, Hong Kong, 2011
space and towers set back from the streetwall. Because of the grouping of the individually owned factories within the buildings, they called the buildings “factory estates.” By 1967, there were twenty-two of these factory buildings, with over 140,000-square meters of space.83 The government continued building these factory estates through the latter half of the 1970s and 1980s with a variety of layouts, from internal cores to those with balconies for extra workspace in order to maintain open floor spans in the factory interiors. Some have large ramps for truck access right into the building. The manufacturing space, actually owned by the city, expanded to 17.8 million square meters, which encompassed over 83 percent of overall production space in the city.84 Today, the city is experiencing an industrial vacancy because of cheaper labor in Mainland China and the initiation of the Free Trade Zones there by Den Xiaoping in the late 1970s. Many of the flatted factories have been demolished because of lack of use and deteriorating conditions. The remaining flatted factories still leased
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