Stilt House Architecture in Tai O Village: Social and Community Supports, Digital Conservation

This paper describes ongoing research in Tai O Village, a historical fishing village in Hong Kong with distinct and prevalent vernacular pang uk stilt house architecture. As of 2022, researcher undertook typological study in Tai O in light of existential threats to their continued presence due to policy constraints, depopulation, and environmental threats. The methodology of this research stands between digital data gathering on physical housing conditions in great detail, and data generation on social housing conditions in Tai O. Researchers scanned interiors and exteriors of twenty stilt houses with a combined digital LiDAR and photogrammetry 3D environment scanner to capture detailed records of stilt house residents’ physical housing conditions. Simultaneously, semi-structured, semi-ethnographic interviews with house occupants captured detailed information on the history, development, and social entanglement supported by each instance of stilt house architecture. This paper will discuss the objectives, workflow, and findings of this study as processing and analysis of project data continue. To describe physical housing conditions, the project employs well-precedented typological study methods, with added techniques and knowledge creation supported by digital 3D scanning technology. The paper discusses how researchers gathered 3D scanning data, processed it from proprietary surveying software into common digital modelling and drafting programs, and interpreted orthographic drawings from original scan point clouds. The paper then presents data extracted from these drawings: net floor area and gross floor area comparisons, spatial adjacency and node-path diagrams, comparisons of spatial programming allocations, and other descriptions of stilt houses’ physical conditions and behavioural affordance. The paper will also present theory and results of Volumetric Development Analysis, a digital technique developed to generate quantitative descriptions of stilt houses’ relative geometric complexity.
To better describe connections between physical housing conditions and the social and community reality they support, the paper also discusses the contents, summary, and prevalent themes coded from ethnographic interviews with stilt house occupants. Researchers conducted initial and follow-up interviews with residents, each interview lasting approximately one hour per visit. We then transcribed audio recordings of each interview, and had them translated from the original Cantonese and local dialects into English. Thematic analysis of interview content provides detailed insight into the social and community life of stilt house occupants in Tai O Village, including interpersonal relationships, historical and community marriage customs, and attitudes toward the past and future of Tai O and its stilt houses. The paper presents major themes grounded in the corpus of interviews to describe social and community life in stilt house districts at the time of this study. In conclusion, the paper discusses connections between physical and social conditions in Tai O, especially vis-à-vis the incremental and multi-step development of stilt housing. In sum, stilt houses in Tai O are evidently the result of long-term, complex development processes, and should be understood as supports for complex social realities as much or more than as physical houses.