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Locals from the Cambodian village of Sneung, on the outskirts of Battambang, collect clean water from WaterHall, designed by Hong Kong architects Magic Kwan and Kenrick Wong. The project won the pair the grand award for sustainability in this year’s DFA Awards.

How Hong Kong sustainability award winners came to a Cambodian village’s aid, ensuring water security while providing a social gathering place

  • Magic Kwan and Kenrick Wong’s WaterHall project recently won the grand award for sustainability at the Hong Kong Design Centre’s DFA Awards
  • Completed in 2019 for less than US$30,000, the twin structure collects and stores 2,000 litres of water to ensure adequate supply for roughly 100 families

Whether it be women at the well in ancient times or water-cooler conversation today, people tend to gravitate to sources of fresh water.

The idea to fill two human needs with one deed saw a pair of Hong Kong architects design a water-harvesting community hall for a small rural community in Cambodia. The social project, titled WaterHall, won the grand award for sustainability at the DFA Awards in October, the flagship programme of the Hong Kong Design Centre.

Magic Kwan Chun-sing and Kenrick Wong Guan-nok became aware of the lack of basic infrastructure in Sneung, a remote village on the outskirts of the city of Battambang, when, as architecture students at the University of Hong Kong, they joined a volunteer mission run by the university’s Humanity in Focus programme.

After graduating in 2012 and establishing their careers – they co-founded architecture firm Orient Occident Atelier (OOA) in 2016 – the pair secured philanthropic partners to fund their first project in the village: a school for local children.

A funnel-shaped roof in one of the twin structures captures rain.

The Adventurous Global School, where some 250 primary and secondary students now attend supplementary classes outside their regular school hours, opened in 2017. During its construction, Kwan and Wong’s intent was always to follow with a community hall. Not only would this provide a social gathering place, it would also ensure water security for a community plagued by drought, which relied on a surrounding lake and wells as its main water sources.

“Their access to water was very unreliable as the lake is dry for half of the year and, even when it does rain, the wells are contaminated by pollution from nearby factories,” Wong says. Constant use of bottled water, with no means of recycling, added plastic pollution to the villagers’ environmental problems.

A grant from the Hong Kong Institute of Architects’ Community Project Fund enabled the partners’ second project, WaterHall, to get off the ground.

Flexible design makes the most of combining two Hong Kong flats

A twin structure was designed to collect and store 2,000 litres of water to ensure adequate supply for the village’s roughly 100 families. In one, a funnel-shaped roof captures the rain; the other houses a pump-and-filtration system that brings in water from the lake and wells and makes it safe for consumption.

Local context was important to the architectural vision. Wong explains that the round shape of the buildings was inspired by the clay vessels the villagers used to fetch their water from the lake. Also important was using locally sourced materials, assembled by a local workforce.

During construction of the structure, children began having fun running around the circular base, the water-storage pillar in the middle creating a sort of maypole. It was then the architects felt confident they were on the right track: they would build; and people would come.

Children play in one of the WaterHall structures.

Suitably for a tropical climate, the structure is composed of bricks laid in a staggered alternating pattern forming a half-height wall, on a concrete floor with a metal roof. But behind the simple facade lies engineering expertise.

“Using primitive local ways is nice in storytelling, but we wanted this project to be long-lasting,” Wong says. “Modern technology was needed to design the filtration plant, and for this we consulted NGOs and experts around the world.” A local engineer developed the specific requirements for the custom-made plant.

People fetch fresh water from WaterHall, completed in 2019 for less than US$30,000, but they also gather there for festivals, events and informal chit-chat.

A pump-and-filtration system in one of the twin structures brings in water from the nearby lake and wells and makes it safe for consumption.

Alongside their other projects in Hong Kong and around the region, OOA continues to work with the Sneung villagers and an NGO to ensure the water is distributed fairly, and funding is available for upkeep and maintenance.

Describing their architectural style as “experimental”, the partners try to inject a story into their design solutions.

“After all, the architecture of a space can be anything – it can be beautiful, it can be raw,” Kwan says. “That’s the beauty of design: once constructed, a building starts its own journey.”

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