We continue to publish interviews of Vladimir Belogolovsky with architectural celebrities. The previous conversation was with Riccardo Bofill, now - a conversation with the heads of the Singaporean WOHA bureau.
Vladimir Belogolovsky:
Please tell us how you met and how you started working together?
Won Mun Sum:
- I graduated from National University of Singapore in 1989 and Richard graduated from the University of Western Australia in Perth the same year. At the time, Australia was in crisis and he came to Singapore looking for work.
Richard Hassel:
- Going to Asia was a natural choice for me, I got there years before the price bubble burst. And when it burst, real estate suddenly stopped being bought and sold. It was then that design became an essential tool. The focus has shifted from an abundance of forms to quality of life and smart financial decisions. We started with small projects; these were mainly residential buildings.
What you are doing can be called “green architecture”. Did you consciously choose this direction from the very beginning?
Navy: I think yes. Back in our university years, we both studied environmental design with a focus on passive energy efficient buildings.
RH: The dean of my faculty was not an architect, but an environmental scientist. We had many teachers whose formation was already taking place at a time when humanity realized the scale of the energy crisis; they were conscious of environmental issues. It was in the 1980s when architects began to pay attention to such slogans as "green" is good."
Navy: Then architects began to compete in coming up with forms, which marked the beginning of the architecture of the "stars". But our training was more environmentally conscious, which led to our design methodology. The key aspects for us are the inclusion of greenery and landscape elements, the creation of public spaces inside buildings.
One of your exhibitions was called Breathing Architecture. Is this a key principle in your work - to create "breathing" buildings?
RH: Exactly. This exhibition was held in Germany, where they often design buildings that are completely enclosed from nature, with a fully controlled microclimate. However, it was important for us to show how porous, permeable and perforated a home can be, since in the tropics, for example, only air movement determines the difference between comfort and discomfort.
Navy: For us, the whole point of building shaping is to find the best ways to provide light breezes and movement of air masses. The air inside the building must be constantly moving.
You also had an exhibition called "Exotics: More or Less."
RH: This was also in Germany, where our exhibition was combined with the Chinese bureau W Architects. We have shown how to achieve greater comfort with a minimum of resources in densely built areas that may seem exotic by German standards. And “more or less” is, of course, a reference to Mies’s “less is more”.
Is there such a thing as Singaporean architecture in your opinion?
Navy: The repertoire of what architects strive for is very wide, but yes, it is quite recognizable.
RH: The local climate has a huge impact on the work of Singapore architects. If you design a home without taking care of cross ventilation, it simply won't be possible to live in it.
Can the climate itself produce noticeable architecture? What about Kuala Lumpur? Climatically, it is close to Singapore, but its architecture cannot boast of the same originality
Navy: Yes, the climate there is very similar to the Singaporean one, but the difference is that in Singapore we go beyond the limits much more often.
RH: In addition, Singapore is surrounded by water on all sides. Kuala Lumpur has the opportunity to grow in breadth, but we can only grow up. Real estate prices in Singapore are much higher, the construction budgets we work with are larger, which gives more room for playing with shape and material.
Did you have a special project that you could call defining? In other words, was there such a project, during the work on which you suddenly realized - yeah, is it in this direction that we need to develop?
Navy: It was a project done for the international competition for the Duxton Plain public housing complex. The competition took place in Singapore in 2001 and was organized by the Urban Development Authority. We didn't win back then, but it was a great opportunity for us to experiment with strategies, many of which we use today. The project turned out to be very useful for us, but the conservative building codes of that time did not allow us to implement it, so we did not win that competition. However, years later, in 2015, we built the SkyVille @ Dawson public housing complex in Singapore based on the same ideas. The residential complex consists of twelve towers of 47 floors each. They are arranged around three rhombic atriums, connected by terraces at the upper levels, which effectively multiply the public spaces of the lower tier.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
RH: We are interested in a lot. Often, inspiration comes from outside, from areas that are often far from architecture itself. We are interested in traditional crafts such as textiles and weaving. We look for ideas for the design of facades and form-building components in them. We are also inspired by the landscapes …
Navy: Almost everywhere, but nothing definite. But what really spurs us on in Singapore is the limited space, we have to think about high density. This is the most important driving force for us.
What do you think about the work of such pioneers of green architecture as Emilio Ambas?
Navy: Of course, we started learning just when Ambas's influence was enormous, and all these buildings buried under the landscape influenced us as well.
What epithets would you use to describe your architecture?
RH: Generous.
Navy: Responsible.
RH: Delightful.
Navy: Sensual.
RH: And if you take a deeper look at our work, there are many connections with Asian visual culture, Asian arts and crafts.
Navy: And also the scale. Many of our projects are quite large, at the scale of megastructures, but we always strive to humanize our buildings so that people can relate them to themselves.
What is the main goal of your work?
RH: Our intention is to be good in the broadest sense - good for the planet, for the city, good for people.
Navy: And good for a developer (laughs). The more people are happy, the better. It is important to achieve results that are objectively good for everyone.
How would you describe what is happening now in architecture? Are we really in a crisis and can green architecture be considered a trend or is it still a philosophy?
RH: I would not say that architecture is in crisis today. Perhaps the whole world is in crisis, and architecture is reacting to it. One thing is for sure: we are now moving away from the formal innovation craze that has been popular for the past fifteen years.
Are you interested in formal innovations yourself?
Navy: This is part of the architecture! We will not give up on it. Architecture is about creating forms. But we believe there is more. We need to produce more than just interesting shapes.
Singapore offers many vertical design opportunities, with connections somewhere in the middle, in the air. How do you see the future of your city?
Navy: Singapore is an island city-state. It cannot grow in breadth, so we should look for the best ways to seal it. Other cities can take examples from us of how not to grow too wide and how to make their growth environmentally responsible.
RH: Our students and I are exploring ideas that can allow the cities of the future to be completely self-sufficient within the boundaries of the city, without relying on giant suburbs. So we are developing strategies to reduce the environmental footprint of megacities to their actual size.
When you design your sky-high skyscrapers, such as the newly built permeable Oasia Downtown Tower in the heart of Singapore, do you imagine that one day all these skyscrapers will merge into a kind of vertical infrastructure with pedestrian bridges connecting neighboring towers?
Navy: We hope so.
So these towers are in a sense a bridge to the future, right?
Navy: Quite right. In our projects, we strive to explore the potential of cities. In the future, cities will become more connected and truly three-dimensional.
That is, the ideas of futuristic mega-cities of the sixties are becoming relevant again?
Navy: Exactly. But in the past there was more emphasis on machine aesthetics, now the goal is to make our cities more livable.
RH: We hope that in the future, the mega-city project from the past will merge with the idea of a garden city. We want our cities to be cozy, comfortable, natural and homely.
Navy: Our dream is to create a comfortable garden and then propagate it on a metropolitan scale so that everyone can enjoy it.
Do you strive to find your own recognizable voice in architecture?
RH: We feel that we already have our voice, even if stylistically it is not as recognizable as the language that some formalist architects managed to achieve. Yes, perhaps our projects do not look 100% consistent in style, but our strategic ideas and views on what is important and valuable to us, all these things should become our style. We blur the lines between architecture and landscape. The notion that man is separated from nature, or that cities are separated from villages, are hopelessly outdated. We see the whole world as a man-made landscape. The only way to preserve nature is to integrate it into our built environment. This is crucial.
