00:04So one of the biggest problems about living in a city like Hong Kong is that
00:09this is now getting very very expensive. And I happened to see a couple of these
00:14concrete water pipes on the construction site and I walked inside and I found
00:19that surprisingly they were quite interesting to occupy.
00:26OPOD is an experimental low-cost housing architectural design which is using
00:33concrete water pipe to create a house which is about 15 square meters so that
00:38people can live at an affordable level. Concrete water pipe is actually quite
00:42good for housing. It is some kind of, it is a material that we are used to, good
00:47insulation properties, it is very inexpensive. So OPOD itself is a long-term
00:55housing solution but this is designed to be transient. So what we do is we locate
01:01these OPODs on spare pieces of land to create fast housing for people and then
01:06once the land is no longer available we move this housing to another piece of
01:10land and make it available for other people to live. So the OPOD you see here
01:15is a prototype and it is about 15 square meters inside. It is about two and a
01:21half meters wide and two and a half meters tall. OPOD's design is based on a
01:27simple approach of using simple materials to get the best out of the space. Now
01:32all of these furniture has been made out of recycled material from our
01:36construction site. In this living area it is organized around this sofa bed which is
01:43able to be folded out into a bed but then closed off into a sofa with some storage
01:47below. And then a series of customized shelving and plugs for people to put
01:54their own possessions here. So the shelving system is a clever reuse of our
01:58scaffolding from site. The main support is actually made out of cut scaffolding
02:03tubes which have been sprayed black and then basically these shelves themselves
02:07as leftover timber panels which we were again sprayed yellow. We've got a
02:13recyclable bamboo floorboard system which creates a flat area of the flat. The
02:19lighting is also very simple here but also very effective. What we do is we've
02:23just taken some fluorescent tubes and we use it to bounce the light from the
02:28ceiling of the OPOD to create a kind of a wider more spatial effect. Otherwise we
02:33just have some LED lighting under the shelves to accent the things which are
02:37placed on display. The kitchen is actually a very very small space towards
02:42the back of the OPOD. It is just made out of a basin, a fridge and a microwave. As a
02:48kind of story behind the OPOD it was very much designed for young people and we
02:53think that young people don't cook very much these days they just reheat. So the
02:58bathroom of the OPOD is right at the back of the unit and basically it's a tiled
03:03a room which has the toilet and the shower in the same space. We encourage
03:08people to open the windows here at the front to open the door and at the back
03:12of the OPOD there's also a very big large openable window. You could have nice air
03:17coming through the OPOD through the front and the back and really maximize on
03:21any cross ventilation. The whole OPOD comes in at about a hundred and fifty
03:26thousand Hong Kong dollars. Now this is about one-fifth the cost it takes to build a
03:31conventional apartment of the same size here in Hong Kong. I think in the future
03:37we must experiment more with the materials that we build and I think as
03:41architects we must become more creative and bold in proposing new design
03:47solutions that brings the best of a city and solve some of the problems
03:51inherent to a city.
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