Ar. Alan Tay

ALAN TAY (AT): The late 1990s was a very eventful period. When the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis hit, I suddenly had a lot of spare time, because my year-long internship was prematurely terminated due to the economic situation. I had a couple of months left before the new study term started. Myself and two friends, Seetoh and Berlin, were trying out the idea of a side gig before we finished school. We knew people who wanted our help on a couple of interiors.

It was the Dot-com boom as well, and our student peers in computer science were setting up online businesses. The entrepreneurial spirit was riding high and we also caught the startup fever. We felt that we could work on interior design commissions and even furniture design while our peers were working on web design. That’s how we started Formwerkz.

But when we graduated, the wider situation had become more serious. It was 2000, and the construction and real estate sectors had not picked up. In fact, there was a massive exodus of local architecture graduates who went to China at that time. But we decided to continue, to turn what was an interior studio into an architecture practice.

AT: Back then, the only commissions accessible to us were interiors and houses through referrals and publications. So, the first decade of our practice largely involved landed housing.

It was a good start, in my opinion, because it laid the foundation for us to hone our understanding of the tropics, which is important because it’s specific to our region, not just Singapore. Designing houses also enabled us to develop our sensitivity to the human scale and our relationship with nature.

Designing houses also afforded us the time, space, and opportunities to experiment and to explore the poetics or beauty of architecture more easily.

Our earliest preoccupation was reinventing the typology of the house, exploring how a domestic place could address the larger issues of climate and disappearing nature. We had always wanted to use architecture as a vehicle to talk about these issues. When we ventured into other typologies, we adopted similar design processes and the issues we identified were carried over from the earlier days.

AT: The four of us were really young to start a practice fresh from school. There are very few architecture firms that have done that in Singapore. Looking back, a better way of evolving would have been to practise with someone after graduation and then branch out on your own after gaining knowledge, and business know-how. That’s still the advice I’d give to graduates, unless there’s a dramatic change to the way things work with practice in the future.

But we just went straight into it. We learned, we suffered, and it was really tough. We matured together. We cried over things we lost and we laughed about things we gained. We have four different and very stubborn minds. But there are similarities that have kept us together. Each of us has very different passions and preoccupations, and that combination has enabled us to leverage each other’s strengths. I feel all of us would receive this honour in time to come.

AT: When the right client comes along, the gold standard is architecture that sensitises the occupants to the tropics. That means accepting the tropics in their entirety: the good, the bad, the nasty, and the poetic sides. The tropics are really unforgiving compared to other climates. There’s not the polarity you experience in more temperate zones. There are many forces at work that conflict with each other. You want to enjoy the breeze, but you don’t want the rain. Things also get mouldy in no time.

For us, it’s a great success when our design provides a buffer that allows the occupants to work with the climate. A house will be alive when you are not in constant, uninterrupted thermal comfort. The occupants will develop daily rituals, like lowering and closing the blinds when it rains. They become part of a cycle of observing nature and being aware of their surroundings, becoming mindful of the passage of time through weathering and shadows. To me, a design that can integrate this kind of awareness is a successful one.

AT: In single-family houses, we usually invest a lot of energy in the design of shared spaces. Our preoccupations and our interests naturally tend toward the corridors and the spaces where you interact and move, as opposed to the private bedrooms. That continued with TMW Maxwell. The key communal spaces we have focused on are the stacked sky terraces that front the development. They will be shared spaces for the apartment dwellers, distributed and connected across different floors.

We are always driven by an investigation of typologies. In this case, the sky terrace became the type we were exploring. We were trying to push the limit of what a sky terrace could be. Sky terraces have been encouraged as part of the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s (URA’s) guidelines for developments since 1997, and they are everywhere. You find them in condominiums, in public housing, in offices, even in factories. They are meant for communal use and the integration of nature with urban living.

Verticality was the start of our investigation of sky terraces at TMW Maxwell. Rather than the entire floor plate that is often dedicated to sky terraces in tall buildings, we created smaller pockets of garden, stacked them up, then staggered them. Doing so allowed for more connection between the floors, so the sky terraces could function more like a hub. Residents don’t have to take a lift to a particular floor at the mid-height of the block, as is often the case.

There was a spirit of post-pandemic optimism when we were invited to take part in the competition for TMW Maxwell, and our proposal aligned with the developer’s vision of working from home. We envisioned these sky terraces not as passive spaces, but as active outdoor rooms that will really be utilised. They could be a new third space, meaning residents don’t have to go out to a cafe. We are sculpting the sky terraces with plants to create differently scaled spaces, with some that would make you feel comfortable if you were alone on a Zoom call, and some large enough for small gatherings.

We’re also integrating different kinds of furniture, which makes sense from the developer’s point of view, because the development largely consists of studio apartments. The sky terraces will be extended living spaces. That whole facade of the building will demonstrate the ethos of live, work, and play.

AT: We won the competition for the Al-Islah Mosque in 2013. It was less than a decade since we’d established our practice, so it was a big thing for us, and we felt very fortunate to have that project. It was also important because it seemed appropriate to reimagine what a mosque could be going forward at that moment in time. This was also the challenge put forth in the brief.

Mosques in Singapore had gone through a cycle of evolution from the very early colonial period, where you had the Sultan Mosque typology, then the mosques that everyone recognises in HDB towns with the tall minarets and the onion domes. In the 1980s, mosques adopted the vernacular style. Then, we had the seminal and very contemporary Assyafaah Mosque designed by Forum Architects in the early 2000s.

When it was our turn, a decade later, the stylistic transformation seemed complete.

In asking ourselves what a mosque is, the idea of openness became evident. We envisioned this openness to extend beyond the tangible architectural manifestation of visual porosity, accessibility, and climatic openness. It would seek to also embody tolerance and to bridge differences in an increasing polarised world.

Most mosques are quite closed off, which makes sense because any religious institution needs to establish a threshold. You need to protect the sacredness of the space. But we wanted to explore whether openness could begin to connect the mosque with the wider population, beyond its community of believers. Architecturally, it made perfect sense because mosques are largely non-air-conditioned. That intimacy with the tropics reconnected us back to what we were familiar with, from the houses we’d designed.

We picked up on a single sentence in the brief. It talked about a mosque without boundary walls. If we removed the boundary between inside and outside, we could create a mosque where certain vantage points on the street would have a view right into the main hall. The design exercise became about balancing the dichotomy of openness and closure, because certain areas still needed to be protected.

AT: My role on the DEAC was an opportunity for me to contribute in some way to the future of design, in terms of shaping young minds. An agenda that I went in with was to raise awareness of the importance of design, not just with respect to designers or architects, but for everyone else.

I see design intelligence as an essential skill for everyone in order for any society or economy to survive in the future. Design intelligence means there’s a certain sense of criticality and an ability to analyse a situation. Before you have a design proposition, you understand the context and the problem statement. You understand what to change. That aspect of understanding, analysis, and criticality is universally applicable across all professions and areas of society.

Whoever you are, if you have design intelligence, you will be equipped to make a judgment based on a critical appraisal of problems. You don’t need to be professionally trained as a designer. That’s the point. It’s an ability to see the world not in black and white, but to recognise that options are possible. I think cultivating this skill should be embedded in all the core subjects at school.

With AI and climate considerations, life will become more challenging in future. If design intelligence is embedded, then everyone in society will have the capacity to deal with issues and solve problems. As I told my family, I saw my role on the DEAC as my obligation for the future of my kids, as well as the nation.

AT: It’s true that the practice is becoming tougher, because there are more issues, more requirements, and more expectations than in the past. It can be distracting. My advice is to cultivate excitement about the challenges and remain focused as well. While engaging with these issues, do so in a way that your design will contribute beyond a rudimentary fulfilment of the brief. Engage with the issues through what you love: Architecture.

Despite technological evolutions, one thing that won’t change is human nature. So, architecture and design discourse should always be grounded on readings of the past and the present, while looking to the future.

AI is becoming amazingly convenient and superior to human capability in many instances. It can make the process of creative production much easier, more expedient, and enables you to resolve complex issues and problems that you hadn’t dreamed of touching in the past. Criticality and empathy make up the human agency that’s left, and for the time being at least, machine thinking will not be able to grasp these as immediately as we can. With that human agency, we can use AI tools in a creative way. It’s advice I give to myself as well!