Tai Kwun is currently the largest remaining compound of historic buildings and represents the very earliest examples of law and order in Hong Kong. The first building of the compound was constructed in 19th Century. After 170 years, it is not difficult to imagine that there would be shortfall in terms of fire safety when comparing with the current standards. Striving for balance between fire and life safety and preservation of the historic buildings and monuments was the biggest challenge to fire safety design of this project. To preserve the historic features, intervention to the buildings had to be limited resulting in numbers of non-compliant fire safety issues that include insufficient exit staircase widths, unprotected internal and external exit staircases, non-provision of required downstand surrounding floor voids, etc.

By using Fire Engineering approach, practical improvement measures were proposed to achieve acceptable fire safety level of the buildings that successfully overcome all these challenges. The grand appearance can be fully visualized to the visitors today and forms a characteristic impression of Tai Kwun.

Arup has been involved in the project since 2007, providing multidisciplinary engineering services including structural, civil, geotechnical engineering and fire engineering. By close collaboration with the team and local approval authorities, especially the specialist conservation architect, we successfully retained, repaired and strengthened these unique historic buildings for adaptive re-use.