There were many firsts when Wah Fu Estate was built.  Donald Liao Poon-huai, or the “father of public housings” in Hong Kong, was the mastermind behind the project.  Being a new home for more than 50,000 residents, Wah Fu Estate was the first public housing estate built with a township concept. It means that the project would include infrastructures from schools to grocery stores to restaurants. By taking care of different basic needs, the project hopes to draw people to move to the then remote location.  Wah Fu Estate is home to Hong Kong’s first public library in a housing estate – the second public library in Hong Kong after the one at the City Hall. It also has the first car park and the first elderly home inside a public housing estate.  Architecture wise, a total of 18 blocks of buildings were built on the hilly landscape by the sea. They were designed individually to adapt to the landscape, to maximize the number of sea-viewing flats and to allow more space in between the blocks. It was the first “Twin Tower Blocks”. The design retains the natural topography by building two connecting housing blocks on platforms of different heights without the need to level the hilly slope. Liao compared the design to “repairing a broken tooth.” Looking from above, the two buildings look like two hollow squares jointed at one corner. The design allows residents’ doors to face each other in the well-like atrium. It is also less likely for people to be staring into someone else’s flat through their windows and vice versa. A few more public housing projects have adopted the Twin Tower Blocks design since Wah Fu Estate. The design was phased out in the late 1980s as the design would require more land, at the same time, yield smaller flats. The well-like structure was also deemed by some a less safe design compared to an enclosed corridor design.