Affordable Low and High-Rise Honeycomb Housing

I'll be there, and I'm looking forward to it:

CTBUH 2016 Session Spotlight | 国际会议亮点:
Social Spaces at Height | 在高处的社会空间

As a result of their densities, tall buildings have the power to connect building users in communal spaces that bend current understandings of how social interactions can take place at height. At the same time, the incorporation of these elements into a high-rise can be somewhat challenging. Presenters in this session will chronicle their experiences drawing public activity into the vertical realm.

高层建筑的高密度使得它有能力在公共空间内将用户们连接起来，打破了对社会交往在高处进行的现有理解。同时，通过这些元素的融合来构建高层建筑也颇具挑战性。本次会议的演讲者将用自己的经验展示如何将公共活动引入垂直领域。

Session 4D:
分会 4D:
"Social Spaces at Height"
"在高处的社会空间 "

17/10/2016
03:45 PM – 05:15 PM

A typical layout with terrace houses and bungalows had been prepared for the site.

Dissatisfied with a conventional proposal, he asked us to prepare an alternative layout which we promptly did. Our layout had more units and a higher sales value than the previous one. With both the commercial and wider aims of the developer met, our layout was adopted.

For this JV between the State Government and a private developer, we had to present the proposal to the Chief Minister and the State Land Exco to get their support as the land-owner and co-developer. Having gone through this stage, the Planning and Building Approvals went through in the normal procedures.

At last, the first Honeycomb project.

What are the special features of the neighbourhood layout and why were they introduced?

In this layout, small groups of houses are laid out around communal courtyards in interconnected cul-de-sacs. Three new types of houses - the quadruplex, sextuplex and duplex houses – were introduced as alternatives to terrace houses.

According to a commentary : “…small groups of houses are laid out around a communal courtyard like friends sitting around a table. This makes it easy for neighbours to get to know each other. Strangers entering a cul-de-sac would feel that they were entering a semi-private area, and furthermore they would be easily recognized as strangers by the residents. It’s like that in the kampong, people know each other; it’s not uncommon to greet a stranger and to politely ask what brought him."

"The loops and bends in the roads leading to the houses, less than 25 metres in any straight stretch, slow down cars to a walking speed. Furthermore, with the Honeycomb layout, parents can easily oversee their children playing in the courtyard in front of each home. Indeed, there are many ‘eyes on the street’ that can deter unwanted behaviour.”

“Giant, fast-growing trees will be planted in the courtyards to shade and cool the outdoors. All these factors will encourage parents to let their small children play outside. The courtyards not only serve as a recreational area, but are also suitable for weddings and any other community events”.

Located by the side of a hill and flanked by existing houses, the earthwork levels within the site were very much constrained and retaining walls had to be built. However, the major part of the retaining walls were built on the party walls of the blocks of houses largely hidden from view.

The houses launched in Phase 1 of the project were priced between RM295,000 and RM458,000. There were many teething problems in this project but the developer did not falter in overcoming all the obstacles. The first part of the project completed in late 2013 and the second in 2014.

Honeycomb Houses

The terrace house has been designed and redesigned so many times that there is not much room left for innovation. In contrast the polygonal cluster houses created by the Honeycomb layout have little in the way of precedence, especially in having to deal with deal with 60 and 120 degree angles. The houses in this Nong Chik project comprise mainly quadruplex, sextuplex and duplex houses.

A quadruplex house

A Quadruplex house from the courtyard looks like a semi-detached house.

The living room and dining together with a kitchen, utility, store and bathroom are located on the ground floor, whilst a family room upstairs leads on to a Master Bedroom, two more bedrooms and a bathroom. The Master Bedroom has an ensuite bathroom.

A Sextuplex House

In the sextuplex house, a residential block is split into six units separated by party walls, with a pair of houses facing one of three courtyards. Thus, approaching a sextuplex from any one cul-de-sac gives the appearance of a semi-detached house.

The Sextuplex house from the front also looks like a semi- detached house.

It has 2170sf built-up area sitting on at least 2070sf of land and was priced from RM388,500. The living room and dining together with a kitchen, utility, store and bathroom are located on the ground floor, whilst a family room upstairs leads on to a Master Bedroom with an attached bathroom, two more bedrooms and a bathroom.

A Duplex House

The duplex house is a semi-detached house which is linked back-to-back rather than side-to-side as is usually the case. It has a total built-up area of 2440sf sitting on 2290sf of land and was priced at RM508,000.

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I’m often asked: “what’s the smallest piece of land that you need to be able to put in a Honeycomb layout. The answer is very small indeed.

The site is located in Taman Debunga, just at the edge of Merlimau, a small town in Melaka.

Triangular in shape, just about 1.3 acres, it is bounded by the back of a row of terrace houses on one side and high-tension pylons on another side. One enters from the third side which faced shops and terrace houses.

The client here was a local developer with more than 30 years of experience, but one which was faced with what they viewed as a stagnating market. Although their main products – terrace houses – were becoming more and more expensive, they were not confident that raising prices was an option. Buying power in the towns that they were building was weak and there were competing developers who appeared content with thin margins.

The client sought us out to help them overcome this problem. They had this small left-over piece of triangular land where they could experiment with a Honeycomb layout. The triangular site proved ideal for courtyard housing. We placed the houses around a cul-de-sac road. Only a pair of houses was allowed direct access from the existing road fronting the shops.

Experimenting with Variety

We managed to squeeze 14 units into 1.31 acres of land: 84% of the development land is sellable; road takes up the rest making up only 14% of the land used.

The density of the Semi Detached houses is almost 11 units per acre, the same as that usually achieved by terrace houses. Small in-fill projects like this can be very efficient if they are able to piggy back on existing infrastructure like electrical connection, water supply and sewer lines and treatment plants as well as amenities like open green areas.

There were two basic types of semi-detached houses – single and double storey.

Double Storey Semi Detach House

Some of the double storey units were attached to double storey ones, but a few were attached to single storey ones, creating an interesting up and down roof-line.

Single and Double Storey

There were also variations in the position of the car porches, adding another level of complexity. Given the irregularity of the site, we could justify introducing a large variety of house-types in order to maximize the number of units.

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Large sites on the other hand are much more difficult to handle. One criticism of Honeycomb housing that is often raised is the concern about ‘getting lost in a maze'. It's true that winding roads can be disorienting. In small scale development, maintaining a sense of location is easy. It’s the big sites that pose a special problem especially if the issues pertaining to scale and monotonous repetition are handled badly. The problem of wayfinding is closely linked to the scale of a project and the extent to which the housing products are repetitive.

Even large terrace housing layouts can be a problem to navigate if the houses all look the same and road junctions are indistinguishable from each other.

A proposal in Johor provided an opportunity to show how this issue can be handled. Our client was a government linked company charged with developing a new township near Tangkak which was to be the administrative centre for a new District carved out from the Muar District in the north of Johor.

There was already a layout plan for a new township of about 400 acres of which 130 acres were designated as residential. Arkitek M Ghazali was asked to redesign the conventional layout that had already been prepared which comprised mainly terrace houses. The client wanted to assess if a Honeycomb housing was a feasible option. It was a difficult project in that the numbers of houses that were proposed was overwhelmingly high compared to existing demand. In addition, affordability was also a problem.

However, for us this exercise could serve as a test for how the Honeycomb layout could respond to problems of wayfinding and scale.

One strategy adopted to overcome the problem of scale the introduction of variety in the layout. A variety of cul-de-sacs have been designed.

There are large courtyards with pocket parks of about a quarter of an acre which are usually surrounded by quadruplexes and townhouses. There are medium sized courtyards that are surrounded by a lower density combination of quadruplexes and sextuplexes. There are also small courtyards which are surrounded by triplex and duplex units.

On top of these there are courtyards that open up to the main distribution roads and they can vary in size to give each one a unique identity. Mainly, these half-courts contain a combination of high-end duplex, triplex and detached houses. Variety along the winding main roads makes each junction more recognizable from the next. On straight roads we see only the road disappearing into the horizon, but prominent buildings where the road bends can become landmarks that give each stretch of the road its own identity.

Solving the Problems of Scale and Wayfinding

The proposed Honeycomb Housing Layout for this proposal builds on the “organic” concept that has been adopted for the overall layout. Three housing precincts are proposed with names based on the traditional practice of chewing the betel nut: Kampung Sireh and Kampung Gambir on the Northern section and Kampung Pinang to the south.

* "Lingkaran Kampung Sireh" (Betel Leaf Village Ring Road) is centred on the existing hill with the housing layout designed to cater for a level change of 10-13 meters from the road, Jalan Kampung Sireh, that circles the foot of the hill to the highest point.

* "Jalan Kampung Gambir" (Gambier Village Road) connects Lingkaran Kampung Sireh to the main 100’ feet road.

* "Jalan Kampung Pinang" (Betel Nut Village Road), curves through the middle of the southern portion of the land.

Branching off from these roads are residential areas which comprise houses that are clustered around courtyards and cul-de-sacs. The dendritic, tree-like, hierarchy of roads allows the numbering of the roads in an easy logical manner that helps people find their way around.

This 50 foot wide boulevard, Jalan Kampung Pinang, that gently curves through the site will have a procession of different types of houses and a variety of small parks and amenities along each side of its whole length, such that the features that appear on the left hand side will be reflected on the right side.

The effect in to create a complex symmetry that mimics the symmetry found in all forms of life.

The houses will all feature Malay architecture with details that will build on the features found ontraditional kampong houses found in and around Tangkak.

The Problem of Affordability

The other, certainly much bigger issue, was affordability. In Tangkak, 43% of the working population earns between RM1,000 to RM 2,000, and 28% earn between RM2,000 and RM4,000. As such, it is advantageous to provide for some housing priced below RM150,000, in particular, to compete in the single storey house category. For this, we have introduced the townhouse type of housing, priced at RM125,000 where the sextuplex unit is further divided into upstairs and downstairs units which belong to owners.

The Sextuplex Townhouse

The quadruplex was proposed as the most common type of house, and it was priced at RM166,000 for the typical unit. Taking into account edge units (the Honeycomb equivalent of corner terrace houses which have extra land), the average price is RM182,000. This was lower than the proposed pricing of the terrace houses at RM188,000 in the current proposal.

The Quadruplex House

More expensive sextuplex and semi-detached house types were also included in smaller numbers.

The Sextuplex House

Semi-Detached House

The proposed development was in fact huge compared to Tangkak’s relatively small economy. Too huge. Even with the projected increase I industrial activity, it would have taken time for demand for housing to grow. The developer will have to launch small numbers of units at a time, especially in the initial stages.

As expected, the developer decided not to proceed with any of the plans for this new town.

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It became apparent that the Honeycomb idea with the hexagonal shapes of the lots and houses was perceived as being not construction-friendly that to many developers . On top of that, it was deemed unacceptable to many in the Chinese community who believed in "fengshui". The offending features were, firstly, having the houses in dead-end roads and, secondly, the shape of the individual lots, houses and some of the rooms not being rectangular.

My first reaction was to ignore these objections, but five years later on, when I was working on a low -cost housing competition where a rectangular building was really essential due to the extreme cost restriction, I came up with a solution where:

there are no dead-ends
all houses and rooms re rectangular
the overall lot sizes are square
the houses have a wide frontages

The houses in this rectangular Honeycomb layout are still located within green courtyards, with every house facing a pocket park. The original advantages of the Honeycomb neighbourhood - safer, friendlier, greener and more efficient in using land than the terrace layout - are still maintained, but now we can also say that the houses themselves are much more spacious and comfortable.

Some of the houses on the periphery of the site would end up without a courtyard in front of them, but they were relatively few; it was a compromise I could accept.

Although we didn't win the competition, the solution was quickly adopted elsewhere. And it was adopted by a very well-established developer.

In "Honeycomb" housing small groups of houses are laid out
around a communal courtyard like friends sitting around a table

Long established developer, PKNS, wanted new ideas to help them push further forward with their land holding in Bernam Jaya which amounted to thousands of acres, in the north of Selangor.

The site

Even after 10 years of acquiring that land they had only developed about 100 acres of it and houses that they had built were low-priced conventional houses that looked dowdy, that could many buyers and that generated low margins.

I was able to make a pitch for Honeycomb housing through several presentations with proposals for a hexagonal and later, a rectilinear layout before succeeding in getting commissioned as architect and planner.

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There were many competing housing projects around Bernam Jaya in Selangor and in Tanjung Malim in neighbouring Perak, but the market leader was Proton City, a high profile development next to the large Proton car-making factory which was designed according to town-planning concepts that were new at that time. It was a gated development with a mix of detached, semi-detached, terrace houses and low-rise apartments arranged around a very generous open space which included a lake which also served as a retention pond. The roads were wide with footpaths and well landscaped. However, this was a high-end project with pricing to match.

PKNS had to pivot away from competing with the low-priced conventional housing projects, but instead to challenge Proton City in the medium-high price category.

The two types of products that was proposed were wide frontage cluster houses and semi-detached houses. The selling price of the main product – the double story cluster house - was fixed at only RM290,000 – RM320,000) compared well with competing terrace houses. As for the Semi Detached houses, which made up 20% of the overall number of units, they were priced from RM350,000, these houses have proven very desirable.

The cluster house products were designed to be alternatives to the ubiquitous 24’x70’ terrace houses in terms of pricing, but with several plusses:

· Seen from the front, the cluster houses look like semi-detached houses
· The frontage at 42’, wide enough to park 5 cars side by side, dwarfs that of the terrace houses
· The side and front gardens to each house make it very spacious
· Compared to narrow frontage terrace house constricted by party walls on its long sides, the cluster houses had more external walls to place windows: in fact the main rooms are able to get cross lighting and ventilation.
The concrete porch allowed the possibility of being turned into a large balcony, adding to the feeling of spaciousness.

Houses with 42' wide frontages, more than double that of many terrace houses,
from RM290,000 (USD70,000)

Cluster houses have more external walls for windows

As for the semi-detached houses, they were placed on a footprint only slightly larger than the cluster houses, and had built-up areas that were smaller than most other double-storey semi-detached houses. This was to create a particularly attractively priced product that was easily sold.

Semi-detached houses laid out on the perihery of the site,
fromRM350,000

On top of the unique features of the cluster and semi-detached houses were the Honeycomb that matched the social quality of the hexagonal Honeycomb albeit at a lower density.

Overlooking the main entrance into the Honeycomb project

Parents can easily oversee their children playing in the courtyard in front of each home. There are many ‘eyes on the street’ that can deter unwanted behaviour. Danger from traffic would be much reduced. Large trees can be planted in the courtyards to shade, cool and beautify the outdoors - suited for recreational and social use, not only for children but their parents and grandparents as well. A child friendly environment is friendly to people of all ages.

The courtyards also provide space for communal events like weddings and festive celebrations where residents can set up tents. Courtyards are also linked to each other and to the main centralized green area.

Parents can easily oversee their children playing in the courtyard in front of each home

Having to provide for circulation space makes up a considerable portion of the cost of housing. For landed property roads can take up 40% of the total development land. In our case it was only 37% and this saving in roads allowed us to provide more green open space area than the planning rules required.

Moreover, by integrating circulation space into a courtyard space surrounded by houses, the advantages of a small neighbourhood are achieved while at the same time reducing the amount of space that is given over solely for circulation. The courtyards do allow for car and/or pedestrian access, but that circulation area is part of a bigger courtyard space that allows for children’s’ play, social interaction and communal events.

The design of the layout achieved almost 10 units per acre and sellable land at 50% of the total development area which respectively matched and exceeded the figures achieved with conventional terrace houses. On this 20 acre site, we were able to build 207 units of which, 20% were semi-detached houses and the rest, cluster.

A bird's eye view

Together with the cost-saving features of the external layout, the internal layout of the houses were also designed to be especially efficient with low built-up area. Both these efficiencies kept down the cost to that of an equivalent terrace house development and helped the developer’s bottom line.

All the units will be handed over to buyers this year and the construction of new phases in Bernam Jaya with higher-end houses indicate that the pivot to more profitable products by PKNS was successful.

We're now working on a new Phase with a new Honeycomb "Zero-Lot" layout.

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I will be giving a talk at this event next Friday courtesy of BCIAsia on high-rise Honeycomb. I'm preparing a more relaxed, version of the CTBUH presentation last week, taking up maybe 35 minutes instead of 25.

This is also the same material that I will use from chapter 10 of the book that I am blogging.

So I've decided to skip about five intervening chapters to start posting about high-rise Honeycomb this week.

When I was a student in the 1970’s, experts were lining up to criticise social high-rise housing. This was the time when the infamous Pruitt Igoe high-rise apartments in the United States were being demolished.

Study after study showed that living in high-rise housing is less suited for habitation compared to more traditional kinds of dwellings.

A review of 129 high-rise research papers over 56 years on the human experience of tall buildings found little empirical support for high-rise housing.

Aren't there any existing solutions on offer?

Green, social spaces on High-Rise Housing

One position to take is of course to insist high-rise housing should not be built at all. Another, is that somehow, high-rise housing is suitable for the rich but not the poor. Still, there have been attempts to overcome the drawbacks of high rise housing. We can look at the idea of providing gardens in the sky as a means of overcoming the social drawbacks of high-rise.

An early, celebrated one is Habitat '67, in Montreal by Moshe Safdie, a multi-storey housing project designed in a cascading pattern such that each apartment has its own private garden. However, providing each apartment with its own garden proved costly, and after Habitat 67, there have hardly been any apartment project that do so (Safdie, World Architecture Festival, 2015).

Habitat ‘67, Montreal

But that was until Singapore entered the picture in a big way with the Pinnacle@Duxton by a local firm, ARC Studio, which was completed in 2009. Singapore had always emphasized tree planting and making their crowded island green; they were now extending their parks upwards. The phrase “sky-rise greenery” was coined.

The Pinnacle@Duxton , ARC Studio

More recently, a spate of new projects that provide green communal spaces in the upper levels of high-rise housing. Today new projects such as the Interlace (OMA Architects), Sky Habitat (Safdie), SkyVille@Dawson (SCDA Architects) and SkyTerrace@Dawson (WOHA) grace the pages of architectural magazines around the world.

The Interlace (OMA Architects)

Sky Habitat, Singapore (Safdie Associates)

SkyVille@Dawson in the foreground (WOHA) and

SkyTerrace@Dawson (SCDA Architects)

To my mind this trend really important in making much needed social improvements in high-rise housing. Indeed, these green social spaces in the air in these green social spaces in the air in should become more common-place.

But whilst providing sky-rise greenery is great, “sky-terraces” or “sky-courts” are extra expenses that have to be paid for. These sky-courts also take up space that could be used to fit in more apartments and so represent an opportunity cost. The issues of cost make sky-rise greenery both less affordable and less likely to be adopted by developers.

However, I believe that we can actually design them a way that makes it affordable for more people. What I will be introducing to you today is a layout concept where, additional areas for private and shared gardens in the sky courts can be balanced by a big reduction in the need for circulation space - achieved by largely eliminating the need for corridors.

And my aim is to try to convince you of that. But first, What exactly is wrong with high-rise housing?

It has been suggested that the defects of high rise housing spring mainly from the quality of these spaces between the street and the apartment, what author and architect Dalziel calls “intermediate spaces”, and which he laments as “weird anonymous space... neither public nor private”.

Corridor

Lift lobby

These spaces are neither suited for children to play in or for adults to socialize.

A recent CTBUH article suggests that articulating the threshold between public and private domains by introducing the missing element of the semi-private realm has long been a challenge; failure to do so is a major drawback of the high rise residential typology.

From “Jan Gehl”, Cities for People, pp83

A blind corridor from Corbusier's Unite D'Habitation

Architect cum researcher Oscar Newman said about the same thing 40 years ago. Newman had observed that across the street from apartments that were eventually demolished was an older, low-rise complex occupied by people from the same background whichremained fully occupied and trouble-free throughout the decline of the high-rise.

Newman’s theory was that it was the quality of the spaces just outside the low-rise homes compared with those outside the high-rise that made the difference. He recommended that architects design in semi-private / semi- public spaces in between the dwellings and the street.

A low-rise solution: for everyone a private and a shared garden

His influence over my work of the last 10 years is very obvious. I try to create – through the arrangement of a private and a shared garden for each house - what Oscar Newman called “Defensible Space”; trying to humanize “intermediate space” and “articulating the threshold between public and private domains.”

In what I called “Honeycomb housing”, small groups of houses are laid out around a communal courtyard like friends sitting around a table.

The features of Honeycomb housing compared to conventional terrace houses make it easier for parents to allow their children to play outside their homes, encourage neighbours to know and interact with each other and perhaps even promote helping behaviour.

Compared to the conventional terrace house grid layout, the Honeycomb cul-de-sacs reduced the amount of land taken up by roads and increased the area available for private and shared gardens.

The previous chapters have outlined all this; I now want to do something similar for high-rise apartments.

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A high-rise solution: for everyone a private and a shared garden

In this new idea for multi-storey residential buildings - I call it the “High-Rise Honeycomb” concept - every resident can step out of her main door to her front yard and beyond that, a landscaped courtyard – or “sky-court” with a garden fence off the edge.

The doors lining the courtyard on the right are the front doors to the apartments. All apartments in this “neighbourhood in the sky” will have such doors, leading into a lofty six storey high sky-court which contains private and shared gardens.

There’ll be at least two questions that I will address:

How do the floors above the courtyard level – and there are five of them – get their access to their 6 storey sky-court?
And will the cost of providing this lavish looking green courtyard in the sky be exorbitant?

High-Rise Honeycomb: How it’s done

Let’s begin with the first question. How is it done? The illustration above explains the problem to be solved. These are two sky-courts on the same floor. To be six storeys high, they have to be flanked by 6 storeys of apartments. There has to be a central lobby with lifts and a fire-fighting staircase. And escape staircases.

How indeed can each one of the six storeys of apartments get direct access to a sky-court?Let’s look at a portion of this plan, to a basic module.

The basic module in this layout comprises two double storey apartments which occupy three floors, one placed on top of the other such that access to both apartment units are on the courtyard level, with one unit connected to another floor above the courtyard level and the other apartment is joined to the floor below the courtyard level.

This is looking at the pair of apartments from the front. As you can see the pair of two storey apartments take up three floors, but both can be accessed from the courtyard level.

This is the same pair of apartments, but looking at them from the side.

Stacking two pairs of these interlocking apartments on top of each other produces a three storey high sky-court.

However stacking these apartments on top of each other such that the courtyards flip from one side to the opposite side produces a six storey high sky-court.

The illustration above shows how each floor in the six storey high sky court can open out onto its own shared and private gardens. The first floor above the courtyard level is part of a unit which is on the same level as the courtyard. The second and fourth floors are both linked to the third floor where there is another courtyard which is hidden from view. The fifth floor is linked to the courtyard one floor above it.

This is a look at the floor plans. Apartments on the courtyard garden level either have stairs going down to bedrooms on the floor below (in red), or have stairs going up to bedrooms on the floor above (in yellow).

In equatorial Malaysia, the blocks are best aligned North, South, East and West, such that all the four sky-courts would get sunlight. This design thus allows in plenty of light and ventilation but provides cover from direct rainfall. Each and every resident in this new type of apartment, can be afforded with a shared and a private garden and so the features of Honeycomb housing have been replicated for high-rise.

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So that is how each and every resident in this new type of apartment can be afforded with a shared and a private garden. Before we go on to the cost aspect I’d like to dwell on this issue first.

If you live in this type of apartment, you share a communal courtyard with small number of households, making it easy for neighbours to get to know and interact each other.

There is sufficient space and light to allow trees to be planted just outside your high-rise home.

With many “eyes” overlooking the sky-court along with safety measures such as a garden fence at the edge of the sky-court and child barriers at strategic locations, the sky-court can be made safe for children.

Children can play just outside in the courtyard, making the high-rise more suitable for families.

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So on to question no 2: will the cost of this new type of apartment be exorbitant, making it suitable only for the high end market.

To answer this question we designed a 30 storey prototype so that it can be compared with other types of apartments, and help explain how the new concept provides for circulation more efficiently.

In this design prototype, apartments face landscaped 6 storey high sky-courts. 274 apartment units are served by 16 sky-courts, each courtyard typically consisting of 18 apartments.

On the ground floor of the podium block are the entrance lobby, shops and the service and utility rooms. On the 1st to 3rd floors are car parks.

On the podium are 18 apartments, community and prayer halls and a big green area.

The apartments, mainly duplex units, are arranged in an X form with pairs of courtyards that swing from one side to the other on every three floors.

These are the floor plans for the apartments with the sky-courts facing the East and West.

And these are the floor plans for the apartments with sky-courts facing North and South.

Space usage was divided into five categories: apartment interior, apartment external area, the shared sky-court area, circulation space, and services. This tabulation is that of a typical courtyard and the three stories of apartments that are accessed from it.

It shows that with the “Sky Neighbourhood”, the circulation space is only 4.32% of the total floor area served by it. This is a remarkably low figure.

The reason is simple: we can see it as taking long, narrow mono-functional corridors and transforming the same area into a regular shape that can be used for multiple uses.

To appreciate this fact let’s now compare it with some examples of high-rise apartments with some existing layouts.

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We can categorize existing high-rise apartment layouts by the method of access to each apartment - single or double loading corridors for slab blocks, and central lobbies for tower blocks and so on. We selected examples of the common and not so common typologies, analyzed their usage of space in the same way that we did for the Sky Neighbourhood example and tabulated the results.

Results

This plans shows the apartment block at Woodlands Drive 41, in Singapore with a “single loading corridor”. This arrangement is not very efficient. Circulation here takes up a considerable 18.8% of the total floor area.

Apartments with a central loading corridor is more efficient serving apartments on two rows along it. . However, compared with the single loading corridor, the ventilation and light from these air wells are not so good.

This is a view of Puri Apartments in Puchong, Selangor with a “double-loading corridor”. Here circulation makes up 16.03% of the total floor area.

This is the Blues Point Tower in Sydney. In the “tower block”, apartments are positioned around a central lift lobby. In this set up, there is a minimum of corridor space, but on the other hand the number of units that can be served by the single lift lobby is limited. Here, the efficient arrangement of circulation space is offset by the rather inefficient sharing of lifts by a small number of housing units.

In this tower block, circulation takes up 11.9% of the floor area; the lift only serves 7 units on this floor.

The scissors corridor is a clever innovation, introduced by Le Corbusier in Unite D’Habitation in Marseilles. Here, internal double loading corridors serve two rows of maisonettes opposite each other in an interlocking arrangement.

These corridors – and the ‘skip-stop’ lifts - are only required to serve every three floors. The percentage of floor space taken up by the central corridor is very low at only 8.12% of the three floors served by the corridor, and the lifts in this case need only stop on one floor and skip the other two: that one stop serves 58 units.

This is an extremely efficient layout, and is not more common because the corridor in this type of layout is rather long, narrow and has almost no windows. Also, the apartment units are also designed to be long and narrow, with bedrooms that hardly seem to be able to fit a double bed. Still, considerable ingenuity has been applied to securing the efficient deployment of circulation space and lifts.

In the 1970’s, Alison and Peter Smithson developed an improvement on the scissors corridor layout concept by having single loading external corridors. Here, the quality of the access corridor was much improved. The wide, well ventilated access external corridors were promoted as ‘streets in the air’. Here the circulation space was not as efficient as Unite D’Habitation but was still good at 12.58%.

Conclusion

This table shows the five examples of some common and not so common layout plans and compares them with the “sky neighbourhood” design. In this example, the circulation spaces, including any corridors and services, occupy less than about 5.1%. In contrast, the circulation space for conventional apartments range from 8.12% to 18.8%. Indeed circulation space in the “sky neighbourhood” design is minimized to less than any existing type of apartment.

The sellable apartment space inclusive of the respective private courtyards is about 86.5% of the available space. This compares with the sellable apartment area making up about 81% to 88% of the total area in the conventional apartments, and 92% for Unite D’Habitation.

Even after adding in the communal courtyard space to circulation space, the total for it, at 13.5%, is lower than the circulation space in the majority of conventional apartments. This is very substantial efficiency improvement that is all the more remarkable because it is achieved by making the apartment design more attractive, not less, by extending the benefits of having a landscaped sky court to every apartment. Indeed, the introduction of the sky court is the key.

However the comparisons done in this study only took account of typical floor plans; they did not take into account the area breakdown of the whole tower block. As such any amenities for social use found on the ground floors or on intermediate floors of these blocks were not taken into account.

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Back in the 1960’s the Singapore government took note of all the bad press against high-rise housing but then carried on building them nevertheless.

They set up the Housing Development Board and embarked on a mission to house the nation with large-scale public housing development. Compared to the cramped and unhygienic living conditions in overcrowded shop houses and squatter areas, flats built by HDB were spacious and equipped with basic services such as electricity, flush toilets and piped water. Still it took an effort to overcome the resistance of people who used to live in the slums and squatters - people were reluctant to be relocated.

But the effort continued: by 1976, more than 50% of the population was living in HDB flats. Now over 80% of Singapore residents live in public high-rise housing and most of the rest in private ones. Satisfaction surveys now show that the residents of HDB flats are quite happy with their situation. So, eager to learn more about socially responsible high-rise design I looked to Singapore.

A preliminary survey of the various apartment layouts adopted for public housing in Singapore was done, looking particularly at how the lobbies, lifts and corridors were arranged. It was observed that there were variations in whether:

the blocks had void decks on the ground floor or not,
were slab or tower blocks,
had single-loading or double-loading corridors, or had central lobbies,had lifts that stopped on every floor or were ‘skip-stop’ lifts

In general, later buildings were taller than the earlier ones. It was clear that the quality of the apartments improved More recently, apartments with sky-decks have been introduced.

I decided to visit and study a selection of apartments with at least one of the following layout features:

• slab blocks with single-loading corridor without a void deck,

• single loading corridor with ‘skip-stop’ lifts

• tower blocks with central lobbies,

• cluster blocks,

• blocks which have sky-decks

An example of an apartment layout adopted for public housing from each decade after the 1950’s was selected, such that the variations mentioned above were all represented.

1950's

Before the HDB was the Singapore Improvement Trust under the colonial government. The Trust was building medium-rise 7-storey apartments like this one in Redhill Close.These apartments comprising two bedroom units are still in good shape, having been renovated and equipped with new lifts.

The lifts here were skip stop lifts with lift-stops only floor 1 (the ground floor to Malaysians) and floor 4.

1960's

The HDB was indeed quick off the blocks. Their first assignment were apartments that were built to rehouse victims of a major fire in 1961. Many of the early blocks have been demolished and rebuilt. But this one in Circuit Road is still there.

The design is in many ways the same as Redhill Close, with two bedroom apartments and skip-stop lifts, except that it is taller at 10 storeys.

1970's

The apartments had the "void decks " on the ground floor for communal use. From now on this was going to be feature in all HDB flats.

Apart from two bedroom apartments, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 also contained 3 bedroom apartments and some extra large 2 bedroom apartments, injecting more variety in the product mix.

1980's

No more skip-stop lifts! These contained really spacious apartments with three bedrooms and a large kitchens, living and dining rooms. And only 4 units per floor.in this tower block with a cenral lift lobby layout.

The remarkable thing about this flat for me is that there is only one staircase for this 25 storey buildings. Normally in Malaysia, there must be at least two.. This is in fact a very efficient layout in terms of minimizing circulation space. There are apparently hundreds of these built around the various HDB new towns.

1990's
The floor plan of this 13 storey building looks quite conventional, but like the example from the previous decade,
you will notice how the apartments are so much bigger than the earlier apartments in the 1970's. Singaporeans were starting to enjoy the fruits of their rapid economic development.

HDB was already building housing for the middle income group, not just the low. The corner units here looks have four bedrooms!

2000's
HDB started experimenting with cluster blocks. This a kind of a hybrid, combining the best features of slab blocks with tower blocks. The units here are linked in pairs and joined to the central lobby by corridors. Every unit is like a semi-detach house in the air. Having a central lobby reduced lift costs, and it seems that the corridors are not too inefficient..

This 27-storey building plan has a high wall to floor area ratio but HDB tolerated this feature which would have made this building more expensive that the previous layouts. Singapore would have reached by now a developed nation status. The apartments look spacious and well-designed.

My only quible is the quality of the void deck is much less pleasant than the void decks in all the earlier blocks. It's that at the void deck on the ground, you can look up at the airwells created by the cluster layout. It doesn't feel pleasant standing around these air wells and the void deck becomes more of a circulation space rather than a space for the community.

However, in on top of the low-rise car park block adjacent to the apartments are roof-top gardens. A new trend had started.

Late 2000's

These much celebrated apartments signalled a new direction for HDB. Here was the first 50 storey high apartment. HDB organised an international competition for this project and the winning design by ARCstudio's husband and wife team of Belinda Hwang and Khoo Beng Peng who won.

In addition to the void deck on the ground floor it had sky terraces on the 25th floor as well as on the rooftop, as well as sky-bridges that connected all the seven blocks. the plans above are of only one block.

In the competition, the judges expressed some concern about the bridges becoming a security threat to residents. But, they also solved a major concern with tall buildings: in the event of fire in any one block residents from the higher floors can transfer to an adjoing block at mid-level rather than walk all the way down.

This was a subsidized housing project and cost was a major concern. The roof and sky-terraces may appear luxurious, but when I did the area breakdown analysis I found something surprising: the percentage of amenity space, which includes the rooftop and sky terrace, is quite similar compared to the earlier buildings with void decks on the ground floor. This is because the earlier buildings could have had one void deck per 12 floors. Here there are 3 “void deck floors” floors for 50 storeys,that is equivalent to about 1 per 17 floors. So, percentage wise, the amenities here were on par!

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In the last chapter, the comparisons done in that study only took account of typical floor plans; they did not consider the area breakdown of the whole block. As such any amenities for social use found on the ground floors or on intermediate floors of these blocks were not considered.In a new study, we compared the Sky Neighbourhood layout with the selection of apartment layouts for public housing in Singapore that we’ve just looked at. The area breakdown of each apartment block is calculated starting from the ground floor up to the top floor.

All the examples we looked at were of single blocks, except for Pinnacle @ Duxton project, which comprised seven blocks connected bottom, middle and top floors. To better compare it with the other conventional blocks, only one block of this project, Block E, was drawn up and analyzed.

Results and Discussions

The overall comparison is shown here, with the figures for the High-Rise Honeycomb example also included:

The Most Efficient Layout

Among the Singapore examples, the most efficient layout in terms of Sellable Area is 710 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 8. It is also the Singapore example with the lowest percentage of Circulation Space at 8.7%.

This is a very leanly designed tower block where the four apartments on each floor have doors opening directly into a central lift lobby. On top of this the whole block is serviced by only a single escape staircase. Being 25 stories tall and having a small footprint, the amenities - located in the void deck on the ground floor - also made up a small percentage of the total built-up area, ie. 3.9%.

Highest Percentage of of Amenity Space

The Singapore example with the most generous provision of amenity space, which is 6 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3, the 11 storey slab-block with a large ground floor void deck.

How is the High-Rise Honeycomb example compared with the others?

The Sky Neighbourhood layout, in comparison with the Singapore examples, produced breakdown percentages that are quite unprecedented. The amount of circulation space is very low – at 4.8% it is less than half of the most efficient Singapore example. In the Sky Neighbourhood, corridors have been eliminated: here access to the apartments is via the communally owned gardens in the sky-courts.

The Sky Neighbourhood model also has a very high percentage of amenities area. At 11.05% of the total built-up area, this is 50% more than the Singapore example with the most generous provision of amenity space - which is 6 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3, the 11 storey slab-block with a large ground floor void deck.

In terms of internal apartment floor area expressed as a percentage of the total built-up area, the Sky Neighbourhood layout at 78% has about the same efficiency as the fourth most efficient Singapore example, 6 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3, at 77.9%.

However, when the external area is added on to the internal apartment floor area, to get the total saleable area, expressed as a percentage of the total built-up area, the Sky Neighbourhood layout at 84.1% has about the same efficiency as the second most efficient Singapore example, Membina Courts, at 84.4%.

The difference is that whereas the private external areas in the Singapore examples are balconies, in the Sky Neighbourhood model, they are the private gardens that serve as a buffer between the communal sky-court garden and the apartment front doors and windows: an arrangement that mimics the front yards of low-rise homes.

How is Pinnacle@Duxton compared with the others?

It achieved a rather low yield on sellable area at 75.6% even though this is a Slab-Block with double frontage corridors. But the high percentage of circulation area can be easily explained by the provision of 5 lift cores in the lobby to provide for this 50 storey building.

As mentioned earlier, the celebrated Sky Terraces at the 25^th floor do not make up such an especially high percentage of the total built-up area. An old slab-block from the 70’s may have had one void deck on the ground floor below a 10 storey block. The tower block from the 80’s, or a cluster block from the 90’s, would also have had a single void deck on the ground floor below a 25 storey block.

The void decks on Level 1 and the Sky Terrace of the 50 storey Pinnacle@Duxton, expressed as a percentage of the total built-up area, in fact make up a smaller percentage than that achieved by the older, lower apartments which have void decks on the ground floors like the slab-blocks at Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 and Woodlands Drive 41.

The innovative Pinnacle@Duxton apartment is without doubt a seminal building that set off a new positive direction in the design of high-rise apartments. It was sold at what were very attractive prices and on launching, were oversubscribed many times. However, this was a subsidized housing project by the Housing Development Board that believed (correctly in my opinion) that the design inefficiencies inherent in the provision of the sky terraces were merited and the extra cost of building this project was well worth it!

Conclusion

So, this new study shows that providing green social spaces as additional amenity areas added to the floor plans of conventional corridor of lift lobby layouts introduces inefficiencies in the design. It also corroborates with the findings of our earlier study: that by replacing corridors with sky-courts, cost savings can be made while at the same time improving the social quality of high-rise.

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A New Typology

By rearranging how residents and visitors access apartments, the High-Rise Honeycomb apartment is new typology that goes to the heart of the problem with high-rise – the problem of “intermediate spaces” in high rise apartments. Narrow single-storey corridors are replaced with sky-courts up to six-storeys high. Access to apartments are only found on every third floor.

Moving forward here are some other aspects to consider:

Reducing the cost of lifts.

In the early Singapore examples, skip stop lifts were adopted to save cost. The savings on the cost of the lift doors plays the smaller part. The main savings came from having lifts that travel faster between stops (because they are further apart) and so reduce the number of lifts that are needed.

The lifts in this sky neighbourhood model only needs to stop every three floors at the courtyard levels. But residents don’t need to go up or down from the floors with lift stops to go to their own apartment like the Singapore examples. From the entrance level of each apartment, residents walk straight to their homes, they only walk one floor up or one floor down to get to their bedrooms.

So, in this 30 storey example, only 9 stops are required on the 27 storey tower block.

We used an online calculator provided by Kone on the design prototype. When we input lift stops at every one of the 27 residential floors, the calculator estimated that 3 lifts were needed.

However, when we entered the actual lift stops required, which is 9 stops, the calculator estimated that only 2 lifts were needed.

Yes, extra cost will certainly be incurred to construct and landscape the six storey high sky-courts. However, savings arising from totally eliminating corridors and reducing lift stops can claw back much of the extra cost.

Reducing the cost of land

Then there is the cost of land - which in city centre development can be far more important than the cost of construction.

This 274-apartment building on a small site of 1.89 acres produces a plot ratio of 4.9 and a density of 145 units/acre which is far above the current planning standard in Malaysia of only 60 units per acre. If planning authorities can accept the argument that high-rise housing can be socially acceptable then they might be persuaded to approve a higher density.

30 STOREY DESIGN PROTOTYPE
Plot ratio	4.9
Density	163 units /acre
Communal courtyard	70% land area, 194.6 sf / per unit
Communal courtyard and private front yard garden	107% land area

The very reason for high rise housing is the exorbitant cost of land in urban centres. The high density and plot ratio of the sky neighbourhood layout would contribute to savings on land cost. Even a small fractional increase in density can easily pay for the extra cost of the sky-courts. I believe that as land becomes scarcer and even more expensive in urban centres, the need for high density high rise housing will become more apparent to Malaysia and other countries. After all providing, green and social spaces in the sky-courts can be said to be a method of producing artificial land that is a small fraction of the price of the real thing.

The Single-Storey Terrace House

Single storey terrace houses were the most common house-type for rural areas and small towns. In urban areas where land has become expensive, single storey houses are not common any more for new developments. Typically, they occupied 20’X70’ plots of land and a few years ago would be priced at RM110,000 and below. However, they are expensive to build with a big area for footings and roof, a large party wall, and low density. Worse, they are perceived as less prestigious than two storey houses.

The Single storey terrace House: “IRIS GARDEN” priced about RM149,000 per unit at Bandar Saujana Putra in Selangor; from LBS Bina website

Now with building costs much higher than a few years ago, even developers in rural areas are shunning the single storey houses. The ones that get launched are also getting more expensive, leaving a gap in the supply of new houses in the RM80,000 to RM130,000 price range that used to be served by the single storey terrace houses.

The Townhouse as a cheaper alternative to the Single-Storey Terrace House

For the solution, we looked to an existing type of residential unit in Malaysia which is called a “townhouse”. Introduced in the 1980’s, it is actually a large terrace house with different owners on the ground and the first floors. This relatively new building type, is for people who can’t quite afford a terrace house, but do not want to live in flats.

The Terrace Townhouse: Townhouse at Bayu Permai in Rawang; from from GM Build website

The terrace townhouses usually have only 22’ or 24’ frontages and this is too tight. The street fronting the townhouses has gate after gate along it: there is no space at all along the street for a second car, or indeed for any visitors. There is also too little external walls for proper ventilation and lighting for the rooms within them: the room layout gets very contorted as the various rooms compete for space for windows.

The Sextuplex Townhouse

We came up with a cluster version of the townhouse. You saw a preview of it in Tngkak ithe last chapter "A Big and a Big Site". What used to be a sextuplex house was divided into upstairs and downstairs units. These townhouses can fill an important niche in the market: while the usual kinds landed property – terrace, semi-detached and detached houses – are becoming more unaffordable for many people, they are not yet ready to accept living in apartments. At about 1000sf built-up area, these would have the same built-up area as fsingle–storey terrace houses. They are cheaper to build than single storey houses because they have more shared walls, floors and roof, and each unit takes up a smaller piece of land. I believe that they should be priced 10% cheaper than single storey houses.

The Upper Floor Unit

The Lower Floor Unit

The new Honeycomb Townhouse designs are an improvement on the terrace townhouses now already found in city areas.

Perspectives of the Sextuplex Townhouse

The Honeycomb Townhouse has the advantage of being a corner unit with a garden to the side. There is more space for windows, and this makes the layout easier – there are enough external walls to provide windows for all the rooms. The Honeycomb Townhouse also has at least 30’ frontage. This means that after providing for the gates to the car-porches of the lower and upper floor units, there is still another 10’ to the side. In addition, the Honeycomb courtyard would mix quadruplex and sextuplex units, but only the sextuplex units are suitable for conversion to Townhouses (the quadruplex units have frontages which are too narrow). So the mixture of quadruplex and Townhouses becomes less crowded than a street of terrace townhouses.

There is another important advantage – the terrace townhouse has a rear garden for the ground floor unit but none at all for the first floor unit. But the Honeycomb Townhouse has a front garden for the upper floor unit and a rear garden for the lower ground unit!

The QuadruplexTownhouse

There is also a rectilinear version of the Townhouse. The layout is much simpler. It is also possible to have a higher percentage of townhouses in this version because all the cluster blocks except the corner access ones can be converted from quadruplexes to Townhouses.

The developer, the Seri Pengkalan Group, which had experimented with the small Honeycomb project in Merlimau Melaka had a bigger problem to solve.

In Melaka, the level of affordability is low; the most popular product was the single storey terrace houses. However, as land prices and construction costs inched upwards, developers could only extract marginal profits from the terrace houses.

This was a problem for Sei Pengkalan too.

For their development just outside a small town, Alor Gajah, about 45 minutes from Melaka city. For some time they experimented with one and half storey terrace houses – products that they could sell at a higher price but which are supposed to be only slightly more expensive than the purely single storey house. However, providing a staircase that can take up 100sf that serves just a few hundred square feet in the attic space is inefficient.

I was able to convince them to build two storey cluster houses instead that had box-like plans that were easy to build. A simpler, cheaper version of the cluster houses at Bernam Jaya was adopted and they were priced attractively RM240,000. These, together with semi-detached houses (also similar to the Bernam Jaya ones) proved easy to sell. There were enough people in Alor Gajah who were able to afford the houses.

The harder problem was that there was still a large market for the market segment that single storey houses used to occupy – houses that cost below RM200,000 down to RM120,000. The State of Melaka by that time had instituted new rules that require a portion of houses to be sold at RM150,000 or less. To overcome this problem we proposed the cluster townhouse.

Laman Kasa

In Alor Gajah, we had designed 288 units of cluster townhouses. Due to the constraint on the selling price, the client insisted the buildings be laid out along straight lines to minimize cost. Still, priced at RM150,000 there was a considerable amount of trepidation on the part of the developer. After all, the terrace townhouse had proven itself to be unpopular; not too long ago, at RM150,000, purchasers could buy single-storey terrace houses.

Nevertheless, the cluster townhouses proved themselves to be an acceptable alternative, and all the units were sold out in three months.

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For many years, my friends and I had been promoting cluster houses as a better alternative to terrace houses. In the projects that were procured, we had to show that, the cluster houses were able to yield a higher percentage of saleable land and as many units per acre compared to terrace houses. Yet, the comparisons involved producing two alternatives of equal value. Because cluster houses always had more land and a smaller footprint, the cluster houses would end up having more land but smaller built-up area compared to terrace houses.

We could see that although land-use efficiency and density of the Honeycomb layout were respectively higher and the same as terrace houses but that the plot ratio – the amount of built-up area compared with the development land area - would always be lower. This wasn’t a problem to us. To compensate we would design efficient corridor free layouts, or add attic floors.

But where land cost is high, the lower yield on built-up area obtained by cluster houses is a major disadvantage. Lower plot ratio means that the cost of land per square foot of sellable built-up area would be higher. In many urban situations where generous amounts of front and side gardens are unsuitable, the terrace house layout can maximize the saleable built-up area.

CAN TERRACE HOUSES BE ARRANGED TO PRODUCE A HONEYCOMB LAYOUT WHERE THE HOUSES HAVE PRIVATE AND SHARED GARDENS?

It took a long time to come around to ask this question - we had always had a Honeycomb vs terrace house mentality - but once posed, the answer came almost immediately.

This is the conceptual drawing of the solution.

As can be seen, the advantages of Honeycomb housing have been achieved:

A small number of homes are arranged around cul-de-sac roads like friends sitting around a table
All the houses face a communal courtyard in front
Traffic speed and volume in the cul-de sacs is minimized

The key was producing a spine of terrace houses where the houses faced one direction then the other. You can see this spine running horizontally across the middle of the layout shown above. In this way cul-de-sac courtyards are consecutively created on both sides.

MAKING BACKLANES WORK HARDER

Back lanes for terrace houses are mandatory in Malaysia. So, they had to be provided in the Honeycomb terrace house layout. Due to this, the land-use efficiency – expressed as sellable land as a percentage of total development land - would not be as high as the cluster layout, though better than conventional rows of terrace houses. On the other hand, the density achieved will be higher than cluster houses. But because Honeycomb terrace cul-de-sacs would comprise short rows of terrace houses, the total footprint area would be marginally lower than a conventional layout made up of long streets with multiple rows of terrace houses.

Still, the Honeycomb terrace house back lanes can be put to better use. Planning authorities have, over the years, been increasing the minimum width of back lanes, from 5’ to 10’ to 15’, and now it is 20’. At that width, cars can now traverse the back lanes and we can use them for access to car parks for residents placed at the rear of the houses.

This has the advantage of allowing the front yard to become a garden and freeing the front streets from all cars except for service vehicles and visitors’ cars. With the much reduced car traffic and the unfenced front gardens, the cul-de-sac street is better able to serve as an arena for social interaction and children’s outdoor play.

A SPECULATIVE PROPOSAL IN PETALING JAYA

There is a small enclave of government quarters in an old part of Petaling Jaya which is ripe for redevelopment. However, it is located in a well-established neighbourhood next to a forest reserve which has staunchly defended against development as a vital green for the Klang valley. Despite its strategic location, anything other than low-rise, low density residential use would be out of the question.

A well connected entrepreneur requested my firm to produce a preliminary design to put forward to the government; the case for the redevelopment of the dilapidated quarters is rather similar the case made for the Nong Chik development in Johor Bahru.

He asked that we design high-end terrace and semi-detached houses priced about RM1,500,000 or more. With only up to 12 units per acre, it was less likely to disturb the local residents and attract objections from them.

Semi-detached houses are laid out along the periphery of this rectangular site. An existing road is widened and adopted as the main entrance with a guardhouse. A club house and neighbourhood green area is placed just off this main entrance. The terrace houses are lined up in the direction of the slope, such that the back lanes can be set at a lower level than the front roads.

This allows the garage at the rear to be a split level lower than the living room, with the dining, wet and dry-kitchens and bedroom 6 all siting above the garage, half a floor above the living room. The first floor is all on the same level, affording the living room a tall ceiling. On the first floor are four bedrooms with bathrooms ensuite, a family room and a balcony garden. On the second floor is a large master suite which has a roof-top garden.

Having the garage for three cars on the lower ground floor allows the whole of the front yard to become a garden, and freeing the front streets from all cars except for service vehicles and visitors’ cars. With the much reduced car traffic and the unfenced front gardens, the cul-de-sac street is capable of serving as an arena for social interaction and children’s outdoor play, even without a shared garden.

The front-yard garden, first floor balcony garden and rooftop garden of each house is connected by a spiral staircase that allows access to a gardener without entering the house. It also allows the mistress of the house to walk down from the roof garden all the way down to the front sitting porch.

All the floors from the lower ground garage to the master suite can be accessed via a lift.
The layout of the semi-detached house follows that of the terrace house, except that one side of the house has openings looking out to a side garden.

Although, this Petaling Jaya project did not take off, another opportunity did present itself. It was also an opportunity to propose a more diverse mix of house-types for a small project in Jasin, Melaka.

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FROM ZONING BY FUNCTION TO ZONING BY INCOME

The sorting out of new cities into separate functions - industrial, commercial and residential was a natural reaction to the squalor of Victorian cities. The ideas of Ebenezer Howard and the notion of town-planning as a reform profession had a strong influence on Malaysian townscapes. Today, the concept of zoning is entrenched in Malaysia’s laws on land and planning. Land titles are largely categorized in accordance with their use – agriculture, commercial, industrial, institutional or residential; similarly, Local Plans that are prepared by local governments as a guide for future development, specifically divide land into different zones for various specified functions.

So, the practice of segregating housing from commercial and industrial areas is an established practice in the preparation of development layout plans. But going further than this, it has also become common accepted practice that within the zone designated for residential use, neighbourhoods are designated by house - type and density.
Higher density housing is placed in different neighbourhoods from medium density ones and from low density housing. This logic has taken on a life of its own – there is something in it that compels 40' X 80' double storey semi-detached houses to be separated from 20' X 60' terrace houses.

Planners seem oblivious to the social consequences of this practice – that it is in fact segregating society by wealth. After apportioning the land for the upper and middle classes, the worst bit of land left over would be given over to low-cost housing. Functional zoning has evolved into zoning by house types and density, and implicitly, by affordability and income.

A 70-ACRE CONVENTIONAL HOUSING LAYOUT

I had an advisory role in the town-planning of a new 70-acre housing estate in Durian Tunggal, Melaka. This was an early proposal for a development near Ayer Keroh in Melaka, a fast-growing township, the following house types are neatly arranged to fit in with the site contours:

Low cost walk-up flats
Medium cost terrace houses 20'x 70” lot size
High medium cost terrace houses 20'x 75'
Medium high cost semi-detached houses 45'x 80'
High cost semi-detached houses 50'x 100'
Very high cost detached houses 65'x 100'

In this example, there are areas for bungalows, semi-detached houses, cluster and terrace houses, and low cost flats. It is perhaps a logical way of creating a new township, where various types of housing products catering to the range of pricing categories, are separated from each other. Here, bungalows are placed on top of the hill, on the most attractive piece of land; less expensive semi-detached houses are located on the slopes of the hill, just above the medium-cost cluster houses. At the foot of the hill are the terrace houses. Tucked away discreetly at the lowest least attractive corner of the land, on a marshy area are the low-cost flats.

Great care has been taken to separate the more expensive houses from the cheaper ones: the most expensive houses are placed on high ground, overlooking the rest; the low-cost flats are placed on the lowest part of the site, opposite the sewerage treatment plant. The rest of the houses are placed in keeping with the same design principal – the more expensive houses are placed on higher ground.

Of course, it is the rich that can afford the very expensive houses, those with medium income will buy the medium cost houses; only those with low income people will buy the low-cost house.

Do people really prefer to live in homogenous neighbourhoods comprising the same type of houses, consisting of residents generally belonging to same income group? If so, should planners distribute homes corresponding to this preference? Whatever the answers, the fact is that to most developers and planners, this is just how it's done.

Has zoning by income become an unspoken tenet of town-planning in Malaysia? The common practice is that development land for housing should be ordered per density of the house type, but implicit in such a practice is the notion that housing should be geographically ordered conforming to affordability and by income level.

Maybe, this is how society sought to be ordered. Town-planners and developers might well argue that rich people don’t want to live too near to poor neighbours. It is not my intention here to challenge the practice of sub-zoning by house type on idealistic or ideological grounds: my point is a commercial one. I would like to argue though that this arrangement of housing products very often does not fit well with the pattern of consumer demand and with what is practical and cost effective to build, particularly in the small residential markets of second tier cities, small towns and outer suburbs.

THE COMMERCIAL AGAINST ZONING BY INCOME

The layout plan for new townships are plans for the future – maybe looking 5, 10 or more decades into the future. As such they are developed in phases. It is difficult to build the whole of it in one construction phase, and it is not desirable to do so. The development content of a new township is almost always more than the current demand for housing. The developer will construct it by phases - each phase suitably sized to be easily built, and more importantly, to be easily sellable.

One problem with the segregated-income layout is that it makes necessary the selling one type of house in one phase, followed by another type in the following phase, and so on. This is fine in a market where the number of units of any one type of house put up for sale is a small percentage of the total demand for that type of house. A developer selling 200 terrace houses in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur where 2000 similar houses got sold the previous year will not face a problem. However, trying to sell 200 of the same houses in a rural area where the demand is for about 50 houses a year is a different matter.

At any one time, there would be a demand for a range of house-types. So, it makes sense that when a single phase of the development is launched, ideally the number and type of units for sale would match the expected demand. Below is how that demand can be profiled and a layout where the house-types are more desegregated.

For a small town where the total demand in a year is 200 units, it is likelier that a phase where there is a desegregated mix of low-cost, low medium, medium and high-end houses will sell better than one where there are only 200 units of say medium cost houses. In the latter situation, people who want high-end houses or low-medium cost houses must be turned away with an invitation to “come back later” as a consolation. It is likely that these potential customers will go to another developer.

The developer did tke note of my arguments and now the layout at Taman Nuri in Durian Tunggal, Melaka is more like the plan below:

In segregated layout situation, for the developer to be able to offer a wider range of options, she must build all around the site, including the infrastructure that must be extended to each section of houses. This option would mean more roads, drains, pipes and cables to be built to serve the house-types which are scattered all over, and would be an expensive and unwise choice to adopt.

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For a proposal in Jasin , Melaka, we combined Honeycomb terrace houses, cluster townhouses and semi-detached houses that varied in price from RM150,000 to RM350,000.

The client is one of the Government owned companies that has been given the job of building affordable housing in Malaysia. Although it has been in existence for over a decade, the National Housing Corporation, SPNB Berhad, had more recently changed its guiding policy. Instead of building a fixed ratio of low-cost, low-medium and medium-cost houses at fixed prices funded by proceeds from sales supplemented by grants from the government, now the affordability range has been stretched to wider range, the ratio of low-end to higher-end houses has been made more flexible, and the corporation henceforth must be more self-sustaining.

Working with SPNB Bhd to help the government implement affordable housing, the State Government of Melaka made available a 20 acre site in Jasin, Melaka. The land comprised a small hill that had been planted with oil palm, opposite a technical school and overlooking a low-cost terrace housing estate and a short row of detached houses.

The hill with the peak in the centre and sloping down all around it posed a challenge. The aim was to try to minimize the earth cutting. To achieve that we set the levels from the lowest points in the neighbouring land and designed the roads from them at the steepest slope that is allowed, which is 1:12. The terrace houses, which had 6m frontage, were raised 500mm at every unit interval to achieve the maximum allowable slope.

The client was keen to test new ideas to match their new affordable housing policy; the idea of a new housing estate with a broader mix of house-types was in line with their new mandate. They were also keen to design housing with better social features compared to conventional forms.

For these reasons that we were able to get this job, and to be able to apply the Honeycomb terrace ideas.

The terrace houses were laid out to in the middle of the site, with steep cul-de-sac roads starting from the lowest points on Eastern boundary up to the middle of the site where the central spine of terrace houses is located.

Here at the spine, the terrace houses face one direction then the other, with cul-de-sac roads on both sides. Drains on this site either go eastwards towards a retention pond at the lowest point in the east, or else it flows west towards the neighbourhood green open space on the west which has another smaller retention pond. Around the terrace houses are blocks of townhouses and semi-detached houses.

In this layout we could place communal courtyards in front of the houses. The Melaka State planners insisted that any open space smaller than 10,000sf would not count towards the 10% green requirement. On top of this, the State Public Works Department (JKR) also required the road around that green to be a 40’ road. However, we believed that if we could minimize traffic in front of the houses, shift the resident car parks to the rear and have the front-yards fully utilized as gardens, the cul-de-sac road could still function as an attractive social space.

We submitted the plans with two car parks for each unit at the rear and using the back-lanes to access them. However, the idea of having the resident’s carparks at the rear of the houses proved to be too radical an idea for the Melaka State Planning. So we had to shift back the car parks to the front. Not ideal, but it was the best we could get.

The site had the old estate manager’s bungalow on the hill-top in the middle of it. This house had to be demolished and the land cut down. There was no way to avoid earth cutting and export because the levels at the periphery of the site were fixed by the existing levels and retaining walls would have been expensive. However, we could minimize the volume of cut earth by making the roads as steep as could be permitted, which was a 1:12 slope.

To achieve the 1:12 slope, the terrace houses were designed to step 500mm every 6m. This meant a step at the boundaries of each intermediate terrace house. However, on the first floor, steps were introduced only every two units, such that the ceiling height of one unit would be 3.1m,but its neighbour at a lower level would have a ceiling height of 3.6m. In this way, the construction cost associated with additional beams on the first floor and roof levels were avoided. At the same time, this additional cost of additional beams and extra walls on the ground floor could be recovered by selling the unit with the high ceiling at a premium.

TOWNHOUSES

The townhouses have 1000sf built-up area each with a car porch for two cars side by side. Unlike the townhouses at Alor Gajah, there are four of these units in each semi-detached block. The internal layout has a living area opening to two bedrooms at the side, a dining and dry kitchen area that opens up to a wet kitchen at the side and the master bedroom suite at the back. Placed on the border of the site, the master bedrooms have vistas overlooking the houses below them.

The townhouses are priced from RM150,000; the lower floor units which have larger garden areas than the upper floor ones are priced slightly more.

TERRACE HOUSES

Each terrace house has a column-free car porch for two cars, a wide living and dining area in the front and a kitchen, toilet and bathroom at the back. The staircase in the middle leads up to two bedrooms and a shared bathroom and a master bedroom with an ensuite bathroom.

Initially, the car porch was to be at the rear but as required by the State Planning authorities, we had to place them in front. The garden area is now shifted to the rear, each intermediate unit garden 16’ x 20’ serviced by a 20’ back lane. The terrace houses are priced from RM240,000.

Original plan with carpark at rear and veranda in the front

Due to the layout design, about half of the units are premium lots being either corner lots with land at the side or units with taller ground floor ceilings or both.

Apart from the Townhouses and Terrace houses are a small number of semi-detached houses priced from RM320,000 and single-storey shop-houses. This mix in the types of houses is expected to make it easier for the developer to sell and deliver the products.

As I’m writing this, the first phase of the construction work is underway with the completion slated for 2018.

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A key reason why the the developer of Nong Chik Heights agreed to experiment with Honeycomb housing was that we were able to convince him that our proposal was not only better in terms of quality, but that it was also cost-effective. In this section, we will address the issue of cost.

TERRACE HOUSING

Terrace housing has long been considered the densest form of landed property development possible. Indeed, of all the types of housing in Malaysia, it is the terrace house that predominates . The typical lot varies from 16’ x 50’ to 24’ x 100’, but the most common lots now are 20’ x 65’ and 22’ x 70’. The ubiquitous terrace house plan has been designed and re-designed many times but always within the same restrictive framework without much scope for innovation.

The housing layout has also become stereotyped. In the typical estate, the terrace houses are lined up along grid-lines with 40’ service roads in front and much narrower back lanes and side lanes. Communal areas for schools, civic and religious buildings, as well as open areas for children’s playgrounds and parks, are also provided. Despite the infrastructure provided, it can be said that the design of many housing estates does not really meet the practical needs of the average resident.

Apart from the aesthetic boredom of rows and rows of houses, among the drawbacks of the terrace house layout is the lack of public security and any genuine sense of community. With the rising price of land in urban areas, many people are resigned to apartments. The terrace house, for all its drawbacks, has been elevated to the status of a dream-home.

HONEYCOMB HOUSING

In “Honeycomb Housing”, instead of rows of terrace houses, we are proposing that every house is in a cul-de-sac with a garden in the middle where giant shady trees will be planted. The courtyard in the middle of the houses is not just a street for transit: it is a place safe enough from speeding cars and strangers, for even pre-schoolers to play on.

Our aim is to recreate the best elements of kampong and small-town life: where children can play outside our homes with friends without fear from crime and traffic, in a community where people know and talk to each other. We are trying to create a more suitable environment for the “kampong boy of the future” – something better than our existing terrace houses. And honeycomb housing can deliver all the benefits of the cul-de-sac housing environment.

For all the benefits that Honeycomb housing may have over conventional terrace houses, it would be less likely to be adopted if the new layout was more expensive and less affordable.

We will first deal with the issue of land-use here. The following post will address the issue of infrastructural cost.

SMALL-SCALE COMPARISON WITH TERRACE HOUSES

A honeycomb neighbourhood comprising 5 units of quadriplexes and duplexes is compared with a terrace house arrangement of an equivalent 5 units. Although the land size of the houses is the same, when we analyze the breakdown of land-use, we find that the area used up for roads (yellow) in the honeycomb layout is much less than that in the terrace house layout. Because we have made the green area to be of the same size, therefore there is more saleable land.

A COMPARISON OF 5 UNITS
	*HONEYCOMB HOUSE*		*TERRACE HOUSE*
	(SM)	(%)	(SM)	(%)
ROAD	334	26	611	41
GREEN	93	7	103	7
HOUSE	861	67	761	52
*TOTAL*	*1288*	*100*	*1475*	*100*

We then compared a honeycomb neighbourhood comprising 16 units of quadriplexes and duplexes against a terrace house arrangement of an equivalent 16 units. It is demonstrated in the table shown that the honeycomb layout is more land-use efficient.

A COMPARISON OF 16 UNITS
	*HONEYCOMB HOUSE*		*TERRACE HOUSE*
	(SM)	(%)	(SM)	(%)
ROAD	879	23	1323	35
GREEN	264	7	269	7
HOUSE	2721	70	2190	58
*TOTAL*	*3864*	*100*	*3782*	*100*

A similar exercise comparing 2 and 8 detached houses laid out in rows an against the same numbers of equivalent honeycomb houses comes to the same conclusion.

A COMPARISON OF 2 UNITS
	*HONEYCOMB DETACHED HOUSES*		*LINEAR DETACHED HOUSES*
	(SM)	(%)	(SM)	(%)
ROAD	334	26	426	33
GREEN	93	7	90	7
HOUSE	861	67	761	60
*TOTAL*	*1288*	*100*	*1275*	*100*



A COMPARISON OF 8 UNITS
	*HONEYCOMB DETACHED HOUSES*		*LINEAR DETACHED HOUSES*
	(SM)	(%)	(SM)	(%)
ROAD	879	23	818	25
GREEN	264	7	235	7
HOUSE	2721	70	2190	68
*TOTAL*	*3864*	*100*	*3782*	*100*

MEDIUM-SCALE COMPARISON WITH TERRACE HOUSES

We then made a comparison between a ‘honeycomb’ layout comprising 258 three-bedroom low-medium cost double-storey houses of 1200sf built-up area on 15.6 acres of land, and that a terrace-house layout consisting of 288 equivalent 3 bedroom low-medium cost double storey houses of also 1200sf with 18’ frontage on 21.74 acres. Both layouts are efficient are theoretically efficient with the land size and shape suited to the requirements of the retilinear and honeycomb geometry. The size of land and number of units are not exactly the same, but this is acceptable because we are interested in the ratios.

	*HONEYCOMB HOUSE*	*TERRACE HOUSE*
	(%)	(%)
ROAD	33	47
GREEN	9	9
HOUSE (Sellable area)	58	44
DENSITY (No of Units per acre	15	15
AVERAGE LOT SIZE	1658	1261

We find that ‘honeycomb’ housing produces here greatly increased land use efficiencies. These advantages are summarized in the mathematical table comparing the terrace housing against quadruplex/sextuplex honeycomb housing. The density is the same but the amount of road for the ‘honeycomb’ is only 33% against 47% for the terrace. Consequently, the average size of each lot is 30% larger!

REAL SITE COMPARISONS

We have done several comparative studies, comparing actual terrace-house layouts to alternative ‘honeycomb’ layouts, to illustrate how honeycomb layouts are more efficient than conventional rectilinear grid layouts. We have done several comparative studies to illustrate how honeycomb layouts are more efficient than conventional rectilinear grid layouts. The study of alternative layouts at Demak Laut, Kuching in Sarawak iis one example.

	*HONEYCOMB HOUSE*	*TERRACE HOUSE*
	(%)	(%)
ROAD	33	47
GREEN	9	9
HOUSE (Sellable area)	58	44
DENSITY (No of Units per acre	15	15
AVERAGE LOT SIZE	1658	1261

In this example, there is the same number of units. The green areas and provisions for amenities are about the same. The terrace alternative yields only about 40% sellable residential land. This yield is quite common for any landed property development. However, the honeycomb layout can yield about 56% saleable land. The reason for this can be seen in the reduction in road reserve – from 38% to 23%.

Another example, for a project in Sungai Lunchoo, Plentong in Johor Bahru, shows again how the ‘honeycomb’ layout reduces the amount of road and improves the ratio of saleable land.

	*HONEYCOMB HOUSE*	*TERRACE HOUSE*
	(%)	(%)
ROAD	35.2	41.2	Fewer Roads
GREEN	10.9	7.6	More Green Spaces
HOUSE (Sellable area)	43.3	40.7	Larger Sellable Land
NO OF UNITS	224	224	Same number of Units

WHY IS THE HONEYCOMB LAYOUT EFFICIENT?

First of all, the back-lane in the terrace house situation is wasteful – this feature is totally eliminated in honeycomb housing.

Secondly, we can reduce the amount of circulation space in a through road by cutting it off at the end. The final length is replaced by paved area designed for turning.

Given a fixed area and number of houses to access, the shorter the cul-de-sac, the less the area taken up by the road. A square cul-de-sac neighbourhood has less road area than a long rectangular one. A circular one by itself would be the most efficient. However, as shown below the circle does not tessellate.

However, hexagonal neighbourhoods interlock without gap or overlap.

The third consideration is the length of the distribution roads that encircle a precinct. The perimeter of a hexagonal precinct is 7% shorter than the perimeter of a square one of the same area.

The fourth factor is the shape of the individual lot and its effect on the buildable footprint after taking account of setback requirements. In the example shown, the truncated triangle shape of 6000 square feet yields a higher plinth area compared to a typical 60’ x 100’ site.

All of the above factors combine in honeycomb housing to produce greatly increased efficiency of land use. A terrace can be seen as a row of houses surrounded by roads. In contrast, honeycomb houses surround the road. It is easy to understand intuitively that roads accessing internally are more efficient than roads accessing houses from the external boundary. This accounts for the efficiency of cul-de-sacs in general, and partly explains the efficiency of ‘honeycomb housing’.

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CTBUH 2016 Conference in Shenzhen

CTBUH 2016 Session Spotlight | 国际会议亮点:
Social Spaces at Height | 在高处的社会空间

A Pioneer Project in Nong Chik

A Small Site in Merlimau

A Big Site

A More Easily Acceptable Form of Honeycomb Housing

Honeycomb Housing on a Rectangular Grid in Bernam Jaya

BCIAsia Equinox - a Boutique Exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, 11th November

High-rise housing

High-Rise Honeycomb Housing

So, why would we want sky-courts?

How is High Rise Honeycomb Cost-Efficient

Comparison with Existing Apartment Layouts

The Singapore Experience

Comparison with Singapore High-Rise Layouts

Reducing the Cost of Lifts and the Cost of Land

The Cluster Townhouse in Alor Gajah

THE TERRACE HONEYCOMB LAYOUT; A HIGH-END PROPOSAL IN PETALING JAYA

OVERCOMING THE PROBLEM OF ZONING BY INCOME

A MIXED RANGE OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN JASIN, MELAKA

SAVING THE COST OF LAND

CTBUH 2016 Session Spotlight | 国际会议亮点:Social Spaces at Height | 在高处的社会空间

CTBUH 2016 Session Spotlight | 国际会议亮点:
Social Spaces at Height | 在高处的社会空间