Question 1

2025

Accepted Answer

May

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice and Koon speak at separate panels at the IASTE Symposium at Alexandria, Egypt. Eunice is sharing "Cosmopolitanism’s Costs: Mansions and Density Management in Mid-Twentieth Century Hong Kong" in the A7 Panel: Urban Culture and Cosmopolitanism. Koon is presenting a paper "Scientific Universalism in the making of New Jiading Science Town – Modernization, Industrialization and the Urban-Industrial Complex," in the B7 Panel: Urban Transformations. Click for more information on Eunice's [+] and Koon's [+] panels.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice is appointed Curatorial Advisor and Exhibitor at the Hong Kong Exhibition, "Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive" at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2025. She speaks at the Forum Panel, “Hong Kong’s Public Architectures,” and moderates the panel “Archiving of Architecture and Urbanism” on Thursday 8 May [+].

April

Community and Agency
Eunice and Koon revisit FAST to continue a post-occupancy and user evaluation, as well as to workshop with the migrant domestic workers. The aim is to develop new co-creative platforms by working closely with the migrant workers and hub management. FAST is one of two Singapore charity organizations first formed to support the rights and well-being of migrant domestic workers. SKEW and Pianjian were involved in the masterplanning and adaptive reuse of an old school site into the new hub for the organization. The goal is to create more spatial and programmatic variations that can support migrant domestic workers and the Telok Kurau neighbors. Darren, meanwhile, beams in via zoom to attend the workshop virtually. More details on the Hub can be found in this news report [+].

March

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice gives a lecture “The Agents of Architecture,” at the ITB School of Architecture, Planning, and Policy Development, Bandung, on March 10 [+]. This is followed by another talk, “Buildings as Archives,” on March 11 [+].

February

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon and Darren bring students from NUS Cities to visit various industrial and post-industrial sites in Shanghai. The contingent visit the award-winning Jia Little Exhibition Center and Ateliers in Songjiang by SKEW, where they experience walking through exhibition spaces, artist studios and offices. The client kindly hosts the visit, and together we discuss the issue of industrial overcapacity in China, and how real estate and urban assets need to be redeployed to serve the city in a more agile way.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon gives a lecture “History and Theory of the Urban-Industrial Complex" at the Re-envisioning the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) Workshop hosted by Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University on February 27. The workshop was kicked off by the XJTLU Design School Dean Marc Aurel Schnabel, followed by keynote lecture by SIP Chief Planner Wu Hao, and Jiangsu Province Planning & Design Institute Suzhou Innovation Research Institute Deputy Director Jiang Weike, SCP Vice President Jiang Shunjie, and others [+].

January

Process and Fragments
Darren muses on what the relation is between the now demolished Merlion Tower and the Merlion cake commissioned for the mythical beast's 21st birthday in 1993. Which came first - the architecture or the cake? SKEW has been involved in numerous design festivals, biennales and public exhibitions, where small scale spatial installations and experiments were built in support of enhancing agency and participation in architecture [+]. This architecture and food analysis would be one of the chapters in an upcoming book entitled "Agents of Architecture."

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice shares her research "Housing Agency, Transnational Technologies and Knowledge Exchange,” at the HKIA  Symposium on Jan 11: From the Past to our Future: Envisioning Hong Kong’s Public Housing Estates – Choi Hung Estate & Wah Fu Estate [+].

Question 2

2024

Accepted Answer

December

Process and Fragments
SKEW accepts an invitation by National Gallery Singapore curator Lim Qinyi to participate in an upcoming exhibition on women in art. This working relationship goes back to Qinyi's 2015 ParaSite exhibition entitled "A Luxury We Cannot Afford," where she commissioned SKEW to present a drawing and research on Toa Payoh as a multi-layered imagined and built utopia. The conversation that followed dealt with complex issues of Singapore's postcolonial identity and its urban spaces [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice moderates a HKIA Tribute to Pei panel at the Pei-designed Bank of China building on Dec. 7 [+].

Spotlight and Media
SKEW recently revamps the Duty Zero stores at the Hong Kong International Airport. This project was done in collaboration with Para Design, and reported in a news show about duty free shopping in the Bay area. Situated not only at the cusp of global travel returning to the pre-Covid age, this project also begs a deeper question of the role of brick-and-mortar retail in the urban age of e-commerce. See the news report here [+].

October

Recognition and Awards
The Unfolding House is recognized at the Chicago Athenaeum International Architecture Awards [+].

Process and Fragments
Urban palimpsest. The once messy and seemingly unplanned Pinglu Road has been cleaned up considerably, and developed into a mixed use cluster. Darren previously brought students of the Cities in Asia summer programme to the Shibei Metal Recycling Plant, which had been decommissioned and turned into print shops, general recycling and makeshift housing for migrant workers in the area. It has now been converted into a sports centre. Some traces remain though, such as old signage, yet to be scrubbed, of the street's old name, Da Xu Jia Ge, above the plethora of signages with its new moniker, Pinglu Road. A Pinglu Road feasibility study commissioned by SKEW's client Healthworks would be presented as a case study in SKEW's upcoming monograph entitled "Architecture of the Urban-Industrial Complex" by Springer Nature [+].

September

Community and Agency
Koon brings a team of 4 design researchers from NUS to work with the New Hope Community Services at their Kampung Siglap Lifeskills Training and Retreat Center. The center director Willy Ong and his team discuss the exciting challenges of working with the vulnerable communities in Singapore, setting the tone for how university research and learning can contribute and make a positive social impact. The team would explore and prepare a feasibility study in 2025 to help the center optimize its functions, growing from a training and community site to meet emerging challenges such as families in need of elder respite care and provisions. The research also expands to a variety of contexts, including how more of such once-dormant sites under the custody of the Singapore Land Authority, can be optimized with strong collaborations with NGOs such as New Hope, with enhanced modes of activation, incentivization and collaboration.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice presents her paper “Dangerous Buildings: Contingency, Architecture, and Development in Postwar Hong Kong,” at Cities in Crisis: Planning and Design, Governance, and Daily Operations, Hong Kong Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, HKU on Sep 14 [+].

August

Community and Agency
Darren revisits Santen's Shanghai Headquarters and has an interesting discussion with the client PM.
Client PM: Do you remember I asked you about this step outside our facade?
Architect: Yes...
Client PM: We have started to place cushions to allow the public to sit here. It is quite popular during the week.
Architect: That was our intention all along, but we didn't want to flag it out as we thought corporations might not like it. But we wanted to allow the building to contribute to the public in some way.
Client PM: I was quite confused at first, but I think it is a good idea...
[Picture taken on a weekend]

June

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice is invited to the symposium Minding her Business: Women, Architecture, and Design, June 13-15, 2024, in Dublin, Ireland. The title of her lecture is “Lena’s Bookshop: Uncomfortable Knowledge, modern architecture and the building of a Southeast Asian space, 1976-2004” [+]

Community and Agency
Eunice publishes the article, “Tough Job: Fieldnotes on Working Women in Development and the Environment.” Perspectives Magazine, National Art Gallery, Singapore, Jun. 7 [+].

May

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon chairs a panel discussion at the 11th China Planning Implementation Academic Symposium at the China Planning Society's 2024 Annual Meeting. He uses the urban-industrial complex theory to frame discussions and debates around the future of core urban functions of the Suzhou Industrial Park and beyond. This panel framework is further developed into a journal CFP [+]. More information can be found at the NUS Cities website [+] and on Wechat [+].

April

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice presents her paper, "A Case for Historicity" for the panel “Designing the Region: Design research and architectural education in postwar Hong Kong & Southeast Asia,” at the Theoretical Foundations of Design Research, Design Research Conference, held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, from Apr. 5-7 [+].

March

Process and Fragments
Rethinking the museum wall - what do we do when we insert a museum into a core-and-shell typology, surrounded on all sides by glass curtain walls? The project responds to the trend of inserting art spaces within commercial towers. Whilst both programs rely on the free plan, they have very different requirements for display and daylighting. Here, the partition walls become the protagonist - multiplied, distorted, mannered, and reconfigurable - in contrast to the found condition of the immutable and inexorable curtain wall.

Spotlight and Media
The Unfolding House is selected to be featured in Architecture Asia Magazine's issue "Reflections on Nature".  The magazine is the official journal of the Architects Regional Council Asia, and is a quarterly, double-blind peer-reviewed journal [+].

February

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice lectures on “Contingencies, Composites and Situatedness,” at the SEA Annual Conference 2024: Devising Architecture Amidst Entanglements and Exigencies, The School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai, Feb. 17 [+].

Question 3

2023

Accepted Answer

December

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice curates and edits a special edition "Competency", of the Ardeth 10 & 11 (2022/23). ISSN: 2532-6457 [+].

November

Process and Fragments
Urban kintsuji - Darren finds cracks in the city and patches them up. Could this be a small planter for a chipped off corner of a fence?

October

Making and Building
Children are often the best measure of how successful a project is. Darren notes the way the two children play and interact with the space at the recently completed addition and alteration of Florissa Park, an intermediate terrace house in Singapore from the 1980s. The external airwell is covered but retains its original use for ventilation and lighting through the use of louvers and skylights. All rooms are connected to the this ventilation core, allowing for cross ventilation and the reduced reliance on air-conditioning, while the public spaces on the ground floor are now linked visually and through a series of cascading platform steps.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon serves as mentor to the Singapore Institute of Architects YAL-IHL workshop, where top students from different architectural design programs at universities and polytechnics came together for a design debate. Back in 2017, SKEW was appointed as the 2017 Archifest Festival Directors, where we first expounded on the study of spatial justice and empowerment across all dominant and vulnerable agents of the built environment [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Christine Yogiaman and Ken Tracy interviews Koon for his research on the Golden Mile Complex for the 4th Seoul Biennale Architecture & Urbanism exhibition. Entitled “Microclimate Infrastructure: Tempering Public Space in a Dense Tropical City,” the video interview is situated within the Guest Cities Exhibition, Parallel Grounds: Cities between Density and Public Value, located at the Seoul Citizens Hall from Sep 1 to Oct 29, 2023 [+].

September

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice participates in a panel talk “Situated Competency,” In Conversation with iPress and Ardeth, Archifest 2023, Singapore, Sep. 30 [+].

August

Process and Fragments
Flesh, once stripped off the bones, might reveal a much different state. This is the case when Darren visits the Duty Zero stores at HKIA for the kick-off ceremony. Structure, previously unmarked on the original as-built drawings, coalesce into immovable fact that sparks a redesign.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon gives a lecture “City as Pedagogy: From Low Carbon to Carbon Neutral Cities” at the China-ASEAN Industry-University-Research Collaboration Symposium on Sustainable Development. This event was part of the China-ASEAN Education Cooperation Week (CAECW) coordinated by Tianjin University, and hosted by Guiyang University on August 30 [+].

July

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice lectures on “The Tower and the World,” Jardine House: An Icon That Shaped a City, Hongkong Land 50th Anniversary Talk Series, Hong Kong, Jul. 15 [+]

Process and Fragments
The term "charette" is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "the intense final effort made by architectural students to complete their solutions to a given architectural problem in an allotted time or the period in which such an effort is made," and comes from the cart used to collect the final drawings of students at the Academie. Here, the construction team, while not students, work hard to put on the finishing touches to the CDF-Lagardere offices at Hong Kong Skies 11 by SKEW Collaborative in collaboration with Para Designworks. Darren muses that unlike students, these workers have retained the use of the cart.

June

Making and Building
Bleak House Books opens in Honeoye Falls, New York. The store is a labor of love for Albert Wan and Jenny, when they moved from Hong Kong to the US. The project transposes their iconic independent bookstore in Hong Kong to the new space in the form of an island-work counter, skewed to reflect the original city's grid. Touches of personal memory appear throughout, including using the ubiquitous red lampshades and neon lights, to Albert's own sketch of his old store, now inscribed in the ceiling. More information can be found at the store's website [+] and more photos of the space can be found here [+].

May

Community and Agency
Eunice participates in the “Women, Architecture and the Photograph 1940s-1980s,” Interactive Workshop, Hong Kong Institute of Architects + Her Architecture, HK, May 27.

Process and Fragments
Progress continues at Bleak House Books in Honeoye Falls, New York. Artist Yerke Abuova has redrawn the client's mental image of his old bookshop in Hong Kong on the ceiling of the new space. The client, Albert, has also hired local NY neon artists to execute a Hong Kong-designed lighting fixture.

Making and Building
Celine's Shanghai HQ is completed. Modernist planes have been deployed not to frame the external vista, but to literally reflect the city's historic and contemporary urban fabric into the top-floor unit located 66 stories above the street. In Chinese, jiediqi (lit. to be connected to the spirit of the streets) refers to being grounded, and is probably anathema to a luxury brand, but here, the street is literally invited into the workspace.

April

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice convenes and speaks in the panel discussion, “Working Women and Architectural Work,” Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration, Discussion Series, The University of Hong Kong, HK, Apr. 27 [+]. A version of the paper can be accessed here [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice gives a lecture on “Housing Contingency: industrial networks, land creation and multi-story mansions in Hong Kong, 1950s-1970s,” The Collins/Kaufmann Forum for Modern Architectural History, Department of Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University, NYC, Apr. 11 [+].

Process and Fragments
In writing a book chapter on the relationship between the country's rural and urban cultures, Darren comes across the term "China's rural vitalization" used by the state, in contrast to the more commonplace "rural revitalization". One wonders if the term implies some form of asynchronicity or disruption of our received historical narrative of progress?

March

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice shares her research on “Working Women and Architectural Work,” Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration, Barnard Center for Research on Women and the GSAPP Dean's Lecture Series, Columbia University, NYC, Mar. 20 [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice lectures on “Working Women into Architectural Practice,” Setting the Table, Shift+W and NOMAS, MIT, Cambridge, Mar. 17 [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice lectures on “Contingent Domesticities: Precarious ‘Mansions’ in 1960s Hong Kong,” School of Architecture & Design, New York Institute of Technology, NYC, Mar. 15.

February

Process and Fragments
Koon, Eunice and Darren wander the night markets of Hong Kong, documenting the iconic Red A lights to be used, recontextualized, in New York.

Process and Fragments
View from the top floor of Plaza 66, Shanghai, après demolition, avant construction. The new project will try to bring the street back into the proverbial ivory tower.

January

Spotlight and Media
Eunice posts a tribute to the late William Lim, who was a beloved mentor to both Eunice and Koon [+]. Eunice's book chapter "Multiple Domesticities versus Homogenizing Difference" is published in Multiple Modernities, ed. W.S.W Lim and J. Chia, 171-181. Singapore: Asian Urban Lab [ISBN: 978-981-1192-14-2] [+].

Question 4

2022

Accepted Answer

December

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice Seng's book chapter, “Behind the Modern Front,” published in Hong Kong Modern: Façades of the 1950s-1970s, by W. Koditek, 22-23. Berlin: Dom Publishers. ISBN: 9783869227986. Information about the book can be found here [+].

November

Process and Fragments
Darren visits Penang and is taken on a private site visit to Fort Cornwallis by Laurence Loh, a UNESCO award-winning architect and conservationist. Laurence is responsible for the conservation of the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion and the colonial fort, and explains the research and development of techniques with artisans from Italy. These construction methods were prevalant in the region prior to widespread concrete use, and can better weather maritime conditions. The conservation is supported by Think City and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and is slated to open in 2025.

October

Making and Building
Santen's Shanghai Headquarters is completed. Located on a lot with a backyard, this projects begs the question of how corporations can be good neighbours and be responsive to a dense urban context. The transparent ground floor design allows the street to share the once blocked-off greening at the back, while a central landscape within the atrium provides additional visual relief to the narrow and oft-congested sidewalk. In line with the company's core audience, tactile flooring is pulled from the street into the lobby and braille is used throughout the space.

September

Process and Fragments
Architect: Can you draw your previous bookshop in Hong Kong from memory?
Client: It's really difficult and painful for me...
Architect: Just do it!

Process and Fragments
Installing see-through concrete is a lot tougher than it should be, especially the construction team breaks it.

Spotlight and Media
The Expanded House has been covered by the Business Times in an article discussing multi-generational housing and the changing demographics of Singapore, "One Home to Suit Many," The Business Times, Sep 23, 2022. The project, undertaken over two phases, changed as the family grew from three generations to four, necessitating an expansion. These changes resulted in the creation of a new private "home within the home" for the daughter's family, and a reconfiguration of the living and dining area, which becomes the nexus for the multi-generational family [+].

Spotlight and Media
The award-winning Unfolding House receives special coverage from the Business Times, "Living Large," The Business Times, Sep 2, 2022.

Process and Fragments
When Hong Kong and Honeoye Falls collide. Piranesi, Rowe and Koetter etc imagined a city as an accretion of its urban forms, a memory receptacle. What happens when memory is no longer geographically bound, but is transplanted thousands of miles away?

August

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon Wee and Darren Zhou lecture on their award-winning project The Unfolding House at the webinar organized by the Singapore Institute of Architects, An Insight into Winning Projects #1, 23 Aug. For more information, click [+] and [+].

July

Recognition and Awards
The Unfolding House has been recognized by the Singapore Institute of Architects Design Awards. Designed as an extension to an existing post-modern Good Class Bungalow (GCB), this project takes ornamentation and crenulations as its foil to create a responsive and performance-driven curtain-wall screen that changes based on occupancy. Koon Wee and Eunice Seng attended the awards ceremony together with YY Ho and Lim Yee Shiang from YY Architects, the architects of record.

Making and Building
A constantly changing space. Chaos Space is completed right after the easing of COVID restrictions in Shanghai. The many paradoxes of this project - siting an arts space within a nondescript office building, multiple functions overlapping in a small space, clients that started off developing rural farmsteads but are now looking to bring the countryside to the city - results in a furniture-scale intervention that embodies contradiction itself. It is at once massive but able to disappear, a self-defined form that also defines space, furniture that is also a room.

May

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice contributes a chapter entitled “An Institution for Independence: The Singapore Polytechnic,” published in the MIT Press book Radical Pedagogies, edited by B. Colomina, I. G. Galan, E. Kotsioris and A.-M. Meister, 302-304. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262543385. More information on the book can be found here [+].

Process and Fragments
Delaminating histories: how do we re-inscribe historical narratives within a site that has reconstructed its own set of myths through an alignment of state and private development? And a corollary question - what are the limits of adaptive reuse vis-a-vis conservation premised on some mythical historical state of being? These are the questions confronting Darren as SKEW designs a new art exhibition space within Shanghai's lilongs - historic colonial-era lane houses that have been gentrified into commercial and leisure spaces.

February

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon speaks at the "Document Fever" Symposium organized by the Architectural Association in collaboration with the Architecture, Space & Society Center, and the Birkbeck School of Arts. He shared a paper entitled "Five schemes and two-and-a-half archives: the pedagogies and politics of urban renewal." Organized by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar, Mark Crinson and Ed Bottoms, the symposium brought together leading postcolonial and urban theorists and historians [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon shares "The Architecture of the Urban-Industrial Complex: Towards a New Pedagogy,” at the NUS Architecture Research Think Tank (ARTT) Public Lecture Series at SDE 4 Forum on Feb 10.

Question 5

2021

Accepted Answer

November

Process and Fragments
Client: we want to create a multi-purpose art/event space in an office tower.
Architect: Let's design a "transformer" that can change this space according to needs.
Client: Sounds great! Let's do it!
Architect: By the way, the "transformer" really is an abstraction of the traditional Chinese garden, and is the heterotopia with which we can study relationships between the rural and urban, nature and artifice.
Client: ...
Architect: Don't worry. That's our own narrative. It will work.
[Initial sketches of transformer]

October

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon discusses his research “Formations of Think Tanks in Asia” at the Planning History Public Lecture Series at Tongji University on Oct 13. This is a part of the planning history curriculum led by Hou Li, author of the 2018 book "Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State" published by Harvard University Press.

Community and Agency
How do we engage the visually impaired within a space primarily used by the abled? How can the abled learn about the experiences of the visually impaired? These are just some questions we have raised throughout the design process for Santen's Shanghai Headquarters. The company produces eye droplets and ophthalmological equipment, and Darren proposed from the start that braille, tactile surfaces and vision be incorporated into the design.

August

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice publishes “Women in Architecture and Planning in Singapore,” in Docomomo SG, Aug. 12 [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon shares his research on the Asian Planning and Architectural Consultants (APAC) in Docomomo SG, Aug 6, 2021. APAC represents an emergence of postcolonial sentiments during the nation-building period across Asia, where its pan-Asian members Fumihiko Maki, Koichi Nagashima, William Lim, Sumet Jumsai, Tao Ho and Charles Correa tried to combine their professional knowledge and elite education background to seek newly formed governments for large-scale infrastructure and planning projects, usually destined to be awarded to Western consultants favored by loan and donor bodies such as the Asian Development Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Bank and others [+].

July

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice's article “Cuts through Hong Kong,” is published in Collage + New into Old, Architectural Review (Jul./Aug. 2021): 102-107. ISSN: 0003-861X [+]. The article analyzes Hong Kong's transitory state in Wong Kar Wai's movie In the Mood for Love.

June

Process and Fragments
What to do with all these peepholes? For the children, they might be an opportunity to play hide and seek. For the parents, they are ways to surveil the children at play.

Making and Building
Work begins on Santen's Shanghai Headquarters, which sits on a rare verdant lot in the Former French Concession in Shanghai. This project is in collaboration with Para Designworks. The project is sited in a highly dense area of Shanghai, but has a private backyard. The building has undergone multiple uses, including a gallery, shops and restaurants, with many additions over the years. It is also located in the immediate vicinity of hospitals, residential and commercial programmes. Part of the ambitions of the project is to create an inclusive space that engages the public, the neighbours, and the differently abled, even though the brief called for a private office Headquarters.

April

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon shares a paper entitled “An Emergent Asian Modernism” at the Building Modernities Symposium hosted by the architecture magazine ARCH+ in Berlin on Apr 16. This symposium will lead to a special issue entitled "Contested Modernities: Postcolonial Architecture and Identity Construction in Southeast Asia" [+].

February

Process and Fragments
While working on the Hakka Community Center, one wonders, how much programme can we densify into a block in Singapore? This design for the community center takes the typology of Hakka housing communities and blends them contextually and morphologically with the surrounding buildings in Geylang, Singapore.

Question 6

2020

Accepted Answer

December

Making and Building
Pianjian has been commissioned to design an addition and alteration for an intermediate terrace block in Florissa Park, Singapore. The terrace is for a young family, but has added amenities for the grandparents and features that anticipate future multi-generational living.

November

Process and Fragments
Redrawing Composites - Hong Kong. This is a continuation of Eunice's research into composite buildings in Hong Kong, a typology of buildings that arose in response to a specific of political, economic and legislative conditions in the 1950s-1970s.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice launches her book "Resistant City: Histories, Maps and the Architecture of Development" at Bleak House Books in Sanpokong, Hong Kong, with a discussion and salon [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon shares his postwar Asian urban theory research on "Post-war Asian Urbanism Theories and Modernism:" (Yazhou Zhanhou Chengshi Lilun yu Xiandai Zhuyi) at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Architecture and Modernity Fall Lecture Series in Beijing on Nov 9 [+].

Making and Building
Design development is complete for a biomedical lab in Jiangyin City, Jiangsu Province. Biomedical companies have been quick to seize on the pandemic as opportunities to expand production and develop their businesses, while many other industries have been negatively affected by the economic standstill wrought by the global disruption.

September

Community and Agency
Koon visits a youth innovation and technology center in Kam Tin with Joan Leung, on the outskirts of Hong Kong. The site sits on peri-urban industrial land, and comprises training facilities, co-working spaces and incubators for the vulnerable youths in the vicinity, and there are discussions with SKEW to expand the operations to include more housing and fabrication functions.

July

Process and Fragments
Thinking about time - geological, political, generational, annual, diurnal patterns, etc. SKEW's proposal for the Kowloon Fitness Park, in collaboration with Lotus Architects, Stone Siu, Dorothy Tang and Ed Lee reimagines a future for changing demographics within an aging and highly dense urban context.

Community and Agency
Darren leads a workshop for the children of Shanghai's migrant workforce to the West Bund Art Museum. These children are from a community in Pengpu district. Migrancy has been an issue for China's rapidly urbanising cities since the establishment of the hukou system, which divides China's population into city and rural citizenry. The workshop allows the children to participate in building and designing the city, and dovetails with the museum's own Mondrian exhibition.

June

Process and Fragments
Testing out a self-assembled movable planter system that can be deployed along building facades. These planters are tests for self-assembled and lightweight greening systems to be deployed at the FAST Hub. During consultation, the stakeholders expressed interest in small-scale agriculture, which the migrant domestic workers will take care of, and use at their culinary classes.

April

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice Seng publishes her book "Resistant City: Histories, Maps and the Architecture of Development" by World Scientific Press [+].

March

Making and Building
The design of three more rural farmstead conversions in Tonglu have been completed. The global pandemic has seen travel come to a standstill, though restrictions in some cities in China such as Shanghai and Hangzhou seem to be more provisional. It remains to be seen what this means for domestic and international tourism to the region, but the rural setting of these farmsteads offer an alternative to the adjacent cities and the risk of contagion that urban density poses.

January

Process and Fragments
The state of emergency and lockdown in Wuhan due to the virus has had a chilling effect in Shanghai. Whilst the Lunar New Year is traditionally a quiet time as large numbers of urbanites return to their hometowns, the city seems eerily still this year. Darren and well-known amateur Shanghai historian Allen Dong surreptitiously explore/flaneur through some of the city's soon-to-be demolished and redeveloped sites in Hong Kou district. No guards tell them to leave this time. The section is revealed, frozen in time, for now.

Process and Fragments
Mixed grounds - how can industrial space, so efficient and "neutral" be folded unto itself to create new urban mixes and sites of participation? Design for a library in South Korea.

Recognition and Awards
The permaculture library in Tonglu, Zhejiang Province, has been recognized at the Tiny Library competition. The Permaculture Library becomes a nexus of knowledge exchange between local farmers, tourists, and the hotel operator, and is a response to the large-scale abandonment of farming practices seen in villages across China.

Question 7

2019

Accepted Answer

November

Spotlight and Media
Eunice is featured in M Plus youtube channel. “Thinking, Writing, and Building: Mediating Architectural Publics,” M Plus, Miller Theatre, Asia Society Hong Kong Centre, Nov. 23 [+].

Community and Agency
The Foreign Domestic Workers Association for Social Support and Training (FAST) holds its gala to raise funds for the new Hub in Telok Kurau, Singapore. SKEW and Pianjian have been working with FAST on the masterplanning and design of the new spaces, and provided a video presentation of the design of the future center, which was unveiled to the public during the charity dinner.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon and Eunice discuss their research “Beyond Critique: Housing and Modernity” at the Housing Modernities Conference: Encounters with Southeast Asian Modernism (SEAM) at Nanyang Technological University Center for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) on Nov 30. The conference is convened at different cities by urbanist, historian and curator Sally Below, Eduard Kögel and Christian Hiller, and hosted in Singapore by NUS Professor Ho Puay Peng and NTU Professor Ute Meta Bauer [+].

August

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice presents "Concrete Garden City: Trans(planting) A Nation, 1950s-present" at the 15th International Docomomo Conference, held in Ljubljana, Slovenia from Aug 28-31 [+].

Making and Building
Darren presents the designs for the masterplan for an emptied out village in Tonglu to the local planning bureau.

Process and Fragments
The firm takes a team-building trip to Tonglu, where they see first-hand the construction and adaptive reuse of abandoned farmsteads into new uses, including a community kitchen/dining and various homestays. For many of the staff, both foreign and local Chinese, this is their first extended contact with rural farmers.

Community and Agency
Darren and Denise (a Carnegie Mellon University student on internship) interview two shifu (craftsmen) in a rural village as part of a research project.
Architects: From your observation in Sanhuai Village and elsewhere, can you tell me about the villagers? We have observed that there seems to be more elderly, but is this really the case on the ground?
Xu Shifu: Youngsters these days are mostly outside (of the villages and towns, i.e. in the cities) studying or working in companies. For example my son, after he finished his schooling, he continued to work (in the city). In the countryside, xiaogong, that is, labourers like us are mostly 60 and above. There are virtually no youngsters doing this. This work is very tiring, and dirty. Not many youngsters are willing to do that.
Architects: What do you think of all the “themed towns” in and around Tonglu? For example, there is the “Bee Town”, “Marvelous Pen Town”, “Healthy Lifestyle Town”, “Soccer Town” etc…
Xu Shifu: I think the government is trying to create interest in these areas, but I don’t know the details. But I worked on building an electrical room a while back in the “Pen Village”, and I think it was a way to increase the renown of Fenshui Township. It is a national level township, and had to go through a selection process. So for us residents of Fenshui, in terms of tourism or other aspects, the county government will pay more attention to our needs.
Lai Shifu: They produce over 100 million pens there. What do you think? There are many pen factories there.

July

Community and Agency
The Foreign Domestic Workers Association for Social Support and Training (FAST) has reached out to SKEW Collaborative and Pianjian to assist in their move from their existing site to a new, now decommissioned school in Geylang. Koon Wee, Eunice Seng and Darren Zhou visit their premises to talk to the different stakeholders.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon shares research from his book “The Social Imperative: Architecture and the City in China,” at the Xuhui Campus of the Shanghai Jiaotong University on Jul 18. This is a part of the Graduate International Summer School on Design – Design Workshop on Future Smart City and Space conducted by the SJTU School of Design [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
The International Summer Programme concludes in Shanghai. Lecturers include Li Hou, Neville Mars, Steven Chen and Allen Dong, as well as visits to Deshaus, SHL/Perkins+Will and SKEW Collaborative. Students will visit Suzhou and study multiple sites undergoing urban transformation in Shanghai, experiencing a city in facing rapid development. The ISPA 2019 programme is a HKU accredited programme, in collaboration with NUS School of Design and Environment. Led by Koon and Darren, the teaching staff for this year include Matthew Chan, Natalie Khoo, Annie Lye and Adrian Wen.

June

Education and Knowledge Exchange
2019 International Summer Programme in Architecture: Singapore-Shanghai has kicked off. For three weeks, students from all over the world will be studying sites, visiting offices, attending lectures and working together in a bid to study the complexities and challenges in both cities. Speakers in Singapore include Kah Seng Loh, Joshua Comaroff, Weng Hin Ho, Eunice Seng and Lilian Chee. Students will also visit DP, WoHA, Zarch Collaboratives. In Singapore, students will also embark on “guerilla” tours of abandoned industrial infrastructure and Geylang, Singapore’s red light district.

May

Spotlight and Media
Eunice is an interviewee for a special feature "Legacy of I.M. Pei, a Master Builder and Maestro Architect" on Channel News Asia, May 17 [+].

April

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice delivers a lecture, "Bauhaus and Modern Architecture in Hong Kong and Singapore," at the 100 years Bauhaus: Design the Future Symposium, organized by the University Musum and Art Gallery of the University of Hong Kong on Apr. 4 [+].

March

Process and Fragments
Fragmentation and the Provisional City as Factory - Mapping Shanghai's dispersed automobile industry in 1949, 1963 and 1990.

Process and Fragments
Non-orthogonal framing. Corporations often think of efficiency as an imperative in office design. Here, while efficient space planning prevails, diagonals in plan and elevation disrupt this logic to provide social and communal spaces, visual thoroughfares cutting through private offices etc. It is Rem's take on Manhattan's Broadway, interiorized.

February

Spotlight and Media
Eunice is interviewed in “Demolition of AIA Building in Wanchai”, Hong Kong Economic Times, Feb. 28.

Spotlight and Media
Eunice discusses “Brutalist Architecture in Singapore and Asia,” on Newsday BBC World News, Feb. 7.

January

Building and Making
Design for three of the homesteads in an emptied-out village in Tonglu is completed. The buildings reuse, as far as possible, existing structures of the farm houses. In speaking with the clients, the toughest part of pulling off rural farmstead projects is the fragmented way in which they have to negotiate with individual families. Additionally, neighbours who have not reached an agreement with the clients often stop construction by means of complaints to the village bureau. From the clients' perspective, this is not a zero-sum game: in renting the land from the villagers for twenty years, they are using land that is underutilized and will return back to these villagers a safer and more spacious abode with modern amenities, while the kickstarting economic activity.

Spotlight and Media
Eunice is cited in Christopher deWolf, “How one of Hong Kong’s most powerful families built a suburban oasis in the heart of Kowloon,” South China Morning Post, Jan. 2 [+].

Question 8

2018

Accepted Answer

October

Process and Fragments
Inspiration from ruins in an emptied-out village. The recent Five Year Plans have attempted to tackle the sannong (three agricultures: agriculture industry, agricultural land and farmers). Yet in the rush to develop these, we often end up with potemkin theme villages, self-similar other than surface ornamentation. Is there something to be said of the broken, the abandoned, the ruined?

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice publishes her book chapter, “People’s Park Complex: The State, the Developer, the Architect and the Conditioned Public, c1967,” in Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power, edited by J-H. Chang & I. Tajudeen, 227-64. Singapore: NUS Press. ISBN: 978-981-4722-78-0 [+].

August

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice presents her paper, "Concrete Garden City: Trans(planting) A Nation, 1950s-present" at the 15th International Docomomo Conference, held in Ljubljana, Slovenia from Aug 28-31 [+].

Process and Fragments
What if the office were like a bento box? This analogy, while eye-catching at first sight, is perhaps less desirable in today's offices, where diversity, mixing and egalitarianism is privileged. Now the problem comes when the clients want the image of a truly open and horizontal organization, but to maintain structural hierarchies. The solution? Not a stew, where everything is mixed, but perhaps nasi padang.

July

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon gives a lecture “Fumihiko Maki and the Asian Planning and Architectural Collaboration (APAC) Part II,” as a part of the panel entitled "A Glocal Approach to Urban Design: Maki Fumihiko, Group Form and East-West Dialogue" at the International Planning History Society (IPHS) Conference in Yokohama on Jul 16 [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
The second leg of the 2018 ISPA concludes in Tokyo. Koon and Darren invited Koichi and Catherine Nagashima, Masami Kobayashi, Akari Nakai Kidd and Eunice Seng to share their knowledge with the students, who also visited the Mitsubishi Research Institute, Mori Memorial Foundation, Fumihiko Maki and Kengo Kuma to learn more about the city and to give specificity to their own findings. The 2018 International Summer Programme in Architecture is supported by Meiji University and the Asian Urban Lab. Instructors include Matthew Chan, Nikolas Ettel, Natalie Khoo and Felice Chap.

Community and Agency
Sometimes journal entries are difficult to categorize - should it be "Community and Agency" or "Education and Knowledge"? Or Both? Koon, Eunice and Darren workshop with students by literally playing a game, and asking them to imagine themselves as stakeholders - residents, developers, tourists, the state, the marginalized etc in an effort to get students to think outside of the school setting. What are compatible and incompatible desires of each of these groups? How do they negotiate with each other to get desirable, or not-so-desirable outcomes?

June

Education and Knowledge Exchange
This year’s edition of the International Summer Programme in Architecture at HKU will bring international students to Shanghai and Tokyo. In each city, students will be exposed to a wide range of learning activities, from lectures, site visits, film screenings, seminars, and tours, and culminate in studio projects analyzing and dissecting salient sites in the respective cities through unique perspectives. In Shanghai, students will attend lectures by Hou li, Iris Belle, Steven Chen, Claudia Westermann and Allen Dong, and will visit firms such as Deshaus, Natural Build and McKinsey. The studio theme will be on industrial sites, dovetailing with the long term research project by Koon and Darren.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon and Darren publish article "The Art of Revolution" in bauhaus now, the official magazine of the Bauhaus centenary. The article draws a thread from Mao's famous 1942 speech at Yan'an on the role of art, through to Xi's 2014 address at the Beijing Forum on Literature and Art. Contemporaneous news reports on the latter speech had noted the leader's decrying of "strange architecture" (qiqiguaiguai), but significantly, this remark had been scrubbed off the official transcript released nearly a year after.

May

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice Seng lectures on the “Architecture of Artefacts,” School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Singapore Polytechnic, May 9.

Process and Fragments
Jollibee HQ thesis diagram - breaking down hierarchy by co-opting Baroque planning principles. Can the Baroque form, so predicated on power and sightlines, be co-opted to undermine such power structures within a corporation? Work commences.

March

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice presents “The City, the woman and other spaces: Modern Domesticity and Architecture in 1960s Hong Kong Cinema,” for The City and Its Double Symposium, HKU and Institut Francais, Mar. 27 [+].

February

Community and Agency
Koon and Eunice lead a "Building Agency" workshop for young architects at the Manila Anthology Festival from Feb 9-11. They also give separate lectures at the festival. The purpose is to empower participants to lead in the professional and civic roles in the production of architecture and urban development. The theme of the festival is entitled "Social Architecture" and it takes place at the Instituto Carvantes of Manila and Fort Santiago Intramuros in Manila. More information can be found  here [+] and here [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon lectures on the topic “Managing Utopia: Critical Reflections & Theories for China and Singapore” at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila on Feb 12. Prior to the lecture, he will meet with senior faculty members in a dialogue about architectural education in the Philippines. This visit and lecture is organized and hosted by Assistant Dean of the UST College of Architecture Marlon M. Cariño.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Darren lectures on the "Architecture of Artifacts" at the HKU Shanghai Study Centre, Feb 1.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon gives a lecture entitled "The Social Imperative" at MA City Design Programme, Royal College of Art at PMQ, Hong Kong on Feb 1. Dr. Tarsha Finney serves as the program director and she is a strong proponent of field-based learning, where students are exposed to multiple urban sites and cultures from London to Hong Kong and Singapore.

January

Process and Fragments
Complex terrain requires complex linkages. The design for a factory complex in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province. Set on a steep slope, the building loses its unitary form, becoming instead vectors to connect the dormitories, offices, production, exhibition, logistics and recreational spaces.

Spotlight and Media
Koon launches his new book “The Social Imperative: Architecture and the City in China” at the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Center for Architecture at New York City on January 5. Framed as an AIANY Global Dialogues Talk, this book launch brings together Art Forum editor Lee Ambrozy, Architectural Record contributing editor Cliff Pearson, and Pratt Visiting Professor Travis Bunt. Eunice moderates the panel discussion [+].

Question 9

2017

Accepted Answer

December

Spotlight and Media
SKEW Collaborative's project, Jia Little Exhibition Hall and Ateliers in Songjiang was the site of a seminal exhibition by a self-curating artsts collective Art-Ba-Ba. The exhibition, named "Bougeoisified Proletariat", aimed to critically evaluate the relationship between state, commerce, and art. This exhibition was featured at the "Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World" show at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum [+], as part of the Shanghai Contemporary Art Archive Project. See Art-Ba-Ba founder Xu Zhen's interview here [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice presents her paper “Domesticity, Labor and ‘Ideal Homes’ in Singapore,” at the Situating Domesticities Workshop, NUS, Singapore, Dec. 7-8 [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
SKEW Collaborative participates in the 2017-18 UABB Shenzhen Biennale, with an expansion of the Urban-Industrial Complex research to include case studies in the industrial sites in the Pearl River Delta on top of the original Yangzi River Delta, further linking the industrial histories and entanglements between Shanghai, Hong Kong, Dongguan and Shenzhen.

November

Process and Fragments
When handlers do not pack boxes the right side up...Urban mapping models destined for the 2017-2018 UABB Shenzhen Biennale now have to be rebuilt, and quickly.

October

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon lectures on "Fumihiko Maki and the Asian Planning and Architectural Collaboration (APAC) Part I” in Panel 2i: Fumihiko Maki’s Idea of Group Form and Urban Design: The Integration of Theory, Practice, and Place of the Society of American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) Conference in Cleveland on Oct 26 [+].

Community and Agency
The Singapore Institute of Architects appoint Eunice and Koon as Festival Directors for the 2017 Archifest. They develop the theme “Building Agency” and invite a wide spectrum of built environment stakeholders from architects to construction workers to participate in over 50 public events from Oct 4 to 17. The festival kicks off with a feast where architects are invited to cook for the community, and it culminates in a conference. There are also lectures, performances, poetry reading, exhibitions, panel discussions, tours and workshops involving more than 30 public agencies, institutions, art venues and NGOs [+].

September

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice co-edits a special issue of the Journal of Architecture entitled "Dwelling in Asia [+]. She also contributes the journal article "Temporary Domesticities: Representations of the Modern 'Asian' Hotel, c 1968-1973" for the issue.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
SKEW Collaborative is invited to represent Shanghai in the “Cities” Exhibition at the inaugural Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism from Sep 1 to Nov 5, where we present the unique urban and industrial histories of Shanghai in the 20th century. The research covers eras as diverse as the period of the Republican era, Sino-Soviet Knowledge Transfer, Great Leap Forward movement, and economic reform era [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice is invited as speaker and panelist at "Retaking the Commons: Hong Kong", hosted by Stanford Human Cities, on Sep 16.

August

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice is speaking at the "Imminent Commons: Urban Questions for the Near Future Debate," organized by Urban Next and Actar Publishers on Aug 28.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice is speaking at Shih Chien University, Taipei, on Aug 26, at the "East Asia New Urbanism: HK and Taiwan," AAM 2017 Weekend Talk No. 02.

July

Making and Building
Tianyi HQ completed. Sometimes commissioned works lead to deeper explorations and research projects. Tianyi Headquarters, located in an old automobile factory-turned office park, is located in an urban area that is quilt-like in its patches of planned and unplanned, new and old, sleek and rough fabric. The industrial forms have almost been completely co-opted by the post-industrial thrust, but not quite. Such fissures are precisely where we can start to uncover the layers of histories, and reveal the uncanny.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
The 2017 ISPA: Singapore-Ho Chi Minh City concludes in Singapore. Students heard from Eric L’heureux, Johannes Widodo, Eunice Seng and Calvin Chua, and visited Zarch Collaboratives, Pencil Office, Arc Studio, Deso, Surbana and WOHA. An interesting note – when Johannes Widodo heard that the planners in HCMC praised Singapore’s planning and were actively emulating the city state, he shook his head and sighed. The 2017 edition of the ISPA was supported by the University of Architecture Ho Chi Minh City, Future Cities Laboratory (Singapore) and the Asian Urban Lab. Studio teachers include Tran Mai Anh, Vu Thi Hong Hanh, Lai Shun Lam and Calvin Chua.

June

Community and Agency
Dr Huynh Thi Ngoc Tuyet literally takes students out of their schools to sit down and chat with residents of the Tan Hoa-Lo Gom canal area, to share her experience with the sanitation and urban upgrading of the district. Her research focuses on empowering the local stakeholders, and find ways of participation in a process that often leaves the voices of the end users unheard.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
The International Summer Programme in Architecture 2017 kicks off in Ho Chi Minh City. Students are thrown into the intense, chaotic, and bustling city in Vietnam, so close, and yet so different from Singapore, which they will visit in the following weeks. The guest lecture series in Ho Chi Minh City inlcude Do Phy Hong, Ly Khanh Tam Thao, Nguyen Luu Bao Doan, Gretchen Wilkins and Huynh Thi Ngoc Tuyet. Students also visited interesting practices such as Vo Truong Nghia Architects, Architype and the HCMC Department of Planning and Architecture.

May

Process and Fragments
Snaking-in new circulation and floor areas. Converting an old automobile factory into a fin-tech office.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice publishes "Architecture of Improvement and Aspirations of Communality" in Vanished Public Housing Estates in Singapore, ed. by E. Ong. Singapore: donotdesign, 10-15. [ISBN: 9789811129629]. More information on the book can be found here [+].

Process and Fragments
(After 3 hours of presentation by the client)
Government Experts: We do not think it is advisable to change the land use of the plot. There is currently no need to convert the land to commercial and office spaces. Our understanding is that there are enough such zoned lots around.
Client: Our boss has spoken to your boss. Both parties have agreed to it.
Government Experts: Well, in that case, we have no comments.
Architect: ???

April

Making and Building
A masterplan for a new business park in Jiading.

March

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice presents “Architecture of Artifacts,” at Anthology Architecture and Design Festival 2017 – Context and Intent, Instituto Carvantes of Manila and Intramuros Administration, Manila, Mar. 31-Apr. 2.

February

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice and Koon give a lecture entitiled “Housing Indust(o)ries” in the Imminent Changsin-dong: Seoul Biennale International Studios Symposium held at the Academy Hall of the Dongdaemum Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul on Feb 10, as a part of the inaugural Seoul Biennale [+].

January

Process and Fragments
SKEW and Cypresse Holdings discuss with the Economic Development Board a feasibility study and business plan for the adaptive reuse of Fort Canning Center. SKEW studied a series of ten different sites across Singapore for the development of a town club for Cypresse Holdings.

Question 10

2016

Accepted Answer

December

Making and Building
SKEW has won the invited competition for the addition and alteration of a prior automobile factory that had been converted into low grade offices in the 90s. The site is a text for reading Shanghai's increasing densification - the construction of the Yan'an Road Elevated Highway cut into the easement, while the original 5m high floors were divided by additional floor plates, resulting in oppressive 2.1m height spaces. SKEW's proposal involves removing the added floors, and to reconfigure the interiors into more comfortable workspaces which include a restaurant on the third floor and retail on the ground facing the main street. Images are from the 1993 drawings when floors were added to the original building.

November

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice and Koon participate at Panel 1 – Imagining the Unimaginable, The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban) Asia Conference, NTU CCA, Singapore, Nov. 25 [+]. Eunice presents “Urban Textuality: mapping a fragmentary discourse on modernity,” while Koon's lecture is on “Incomplete Urbanism: Local Intelligentsia, Global Planning Movements and the State” [+].

October

Making and Building
Sectech Headquarters completes construction. New breakout spaces are threaded through an old factory space in order to subvert blue-collar and white-collar relations. During construction, the motto expressing the need for efficiency and effectiveness was partially demolished. Originally overscaled and set on a blank wall, it was imposing, forbidding, and seemingly unbreachable. The new design opens up this wall dividing the office workers from the production space, begging the question - does the absence of the words imply less efficiency and effectiveness?

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon shares the research of his design practice “Architecture of Artifacts: Excerpts of a Diaspora Manifesto” at the Fall 2016 DAAE Public Lectures ad the Department of Architecture & Architectural Engineering (DAAE), Seoul National University on Oct 5. In the same evening, Simon Kim from UPenn discusses his work entitled "Curated Sentience in Architecture." John Hong from SNU moderates the Q&A and discussion.

September

Process and Fragments
Fengshui Master: You need to put the car entrance at the lower left "gua". It is the "gua" of knowledge and wisdom.
British Client: This does not make sense. I want to enter from the middle. This old colonial building has an entrance just like that already.
Fengshui Master: That is the "gua" of fame and reputation, and is unsuitable for cars.
British Client: I don't think they had cars back when fengshui was invented...

July

Making and Building
SKEW Collaborative has been commissioned to produce a feasibility study for Fort Canning Club, transforming the original colonial building into a new private club.

Recognition and Awards
The Xishuidong Industrial Heritage Retail District has been recognized by the Chicago Athenaeum International Architecture Awards.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice presents “High Density, Housing and Architecture: Some historical and critical reflections,” at the Rethinking Modern Asia-Pacific Architectures: New Aesthetic Pedagogies International Workshop, University of Melbourne, Jul. 4-5 [+].

Process and Fragments
When you plan a guerilla tour, but are given one instead by one of the most respected thinkers and academics in Seoul, it is a really special thing indeed...After the conclusion of the ISPA, Koon, Darren and Laishun Lam are invited by Prof. Kyungrip Park to a little night flaneur through central Seoul, where he points out the historic fabric below private and public buildings that he pushed to be preserved and exhibited to the public. The historic layers create a largely overlooked route through the city, right under our feet.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
The 2016 ISPA wraps up in Seoul. After last year’s planned visit to the South Korean capital was cancelled due to MERS, we are ecstatic to work with Kangwon University, who has kindly hosted our programme. This year’s slate of lecturers in Seoul include Jinman Jo, John Hong, Hyunjun Kim and Choon Choi, and students also visited Guga, Haean Architects, Wondoshi, Mass Studies and One O One, thereby learning of the different forms of practice in Seoul. Koon and Darren would like to thank their collaborators, Kangwon National University and Asian Urban Lab for their support of the programme. The studio instructors for this year’s programme include Lai Shun Lam, Hyunjun Kim, Kyuduhk Seo, Pedro Martins and Kelsy Alexander.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
This year’s International Summer Programme in Architecture kicks-off in Shanghai. Led by Koon and Darren, the studio will focus on the question of “the industrial” within the dynamic cities of Shanghai and Seoul. The Seoul leg was cancelled the previous year due to the MERS outbreak and we are happy to bring students to this vibrant city this year. In Shanghai, students will attend lectures by Jiang Jun, Steven Chen, Allen Dong and Bill Yen, and visit Stuio Qi, LYCS, Natural Build, Deshaus and Guga. Additionally, students will embark on a field trip to Hangzhou, where they will also visit the “fake Paris” Tiandu City and Wang Shu’s CAA campus amongst others.

May

Process and Fragments
Internal charette where teams had to come up with the design for a "Napavilion" - a pavilion for napping.

Recognition and Awards
Darren Zhou receives the 40 Under 40 Awards from Perspective Global magazine in Hong Kong.

April

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice and Koon present two separate research papers at the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Annual International Conference in Pasadena from Apr 6-10. Eunice shares a paper entitled "Technologies of the Slab: Jardine House and visions of modern Hong Kong," in the panel convened by Stanislaus von Moos "Scandalous Slabs: The Semantics of the Modernist Office Building after 1945. Koon presents a paper entitled "William Lim’s Golden Mile Complex and the Vicissitudes of the Stepped Megaform,” in the panel convened by Eric Mumford "Group Form and Urban Design Since 1960" [+].

Building and Making
Work-live typology. Literally building a village above offices in Nanhui, Shanghai. Here two scales are stacked one on top of another - the efficient lower floors for work, and the finer-grained upper floors for artist studios and fostering a neighbourhood community. The developer and architect are strategically throwing a "chabianqiu" (lit. curveball) - the site is not zoned for residential, but such mixes can enliven an otherwise prosaic programme.

Process and Fragments
Framing the uncanny. As work progresses at the Sectech HQ, the newly opened-up facade reveals what was always there all along - an old house transported from Anhui and rebuilt, brick by brick, by the developer, in his industrial park. Freud defines the uncanny as the manifestation of repressed memories, a bubbling up of what was once hidden, to produce an unsettling experience. Darren wonders if this form of decontextualized reconstruction is disturbing, fascinating, or indeed, both.

March

Making and Building
SKEW comes in third in the Hong Kong Stonecutters Island Military Museum Invited Design Competition, in collaboration with the Shenzhen General Institute of Architectural Design and Research Co. Ltd. This is a politically sensitive project that is not widely reported in the media because the site is within the former British Naval Base on Stonecutters Island. The museum is slated to be one of the site of the 20th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong in 2017, but another site is eventually adopted.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon gives an introductory lecture "Managing Utopia” at the book launch of the Singapore Dreaming: Managing Utopia, published by Asian Urban Lab at 72-13 TheaterWorks on Mar 19. Prof Wang Gungwu is the guest of honor at the launch, and Prof Kishore Mahbubani and Li Shiqiao provide endorsements for the book [+]. Eunice contributes a chapter entitled "Transnational Utopia: an Architectural Manifesto" for the book.

Question 11

2015

Accepted Answer

December

Making and Building
Lippo Plaza Public Space Upgrading completed. Upgrading an old tower using light.

November

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice Seng speaks at "Singapore and Utopia", Para Site Gallery's public programme "5X7" comprising 5 invitations with 7 guests, at Para Site Contemporary Art Center, Hong Kong on Nov 10 [+].

September

Making and Building
Chuangyi Fashion Flagship completed. The store is a quick fix to an unused building by the shopping outlet's own management team. The outlet itself is a "Disney-fied" development, with Potemkin facades on big boxes. The store is thus extremely narrow but deep, in line with the divisions prescribed by elevation that mimic an old Italian townscape, thoroughly incompatible with retail planning. The solution was the multiply the "street frontage" on the interior, through movable screens made out of paper, which further provide flexibility for different pop-up brands to be sold within.

Making and Building
Koon Wee, Eunice Seng and Darren Zhou join OMA and Olin's team in presenting their scheme for the Singapore Rail Corridor competition to the URA. The international, multi-disciplinary team also includes Atelier Dreiseitl, Atelier Ten, Camphora, DPA, DPG, Langdon & Seah, Ramboll, MVA, Space Agency, Studio Lapis and XClinic. The team was one of five shortlisted proposals for Singapore's 24-km long Rail Corridor, a strip of land that was returned to Singapore by Malaysia through a historic land exchange, and promises to be a transformative infrastructural-landscape-planning project. The images below show the extensive mapping done by SKEW of Singapore's greenery as delaminated layers (l) and the entirety of the rail corridor as a "museum" to competing narratives (r).

Education and Knowledge Exchange
SKEW Collaborative was commissioned to produce a piece entitled "Void Deck: Planned Utopias, Toa Payoh" for the Luxury We Cannot Afford exhibition held at ParaSite Gallery, Hong Kong. The title of the exhibition comes from a phrase uttered by Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew, when he remarked that Singapore in the 60s had no space or resources for the arts. The exhibition is curated by Lim Qinyi. For this project, SKEW proposed an alternative master plan to Toa Payoh, HDB's first planned satellite town, by overlaying on the town a previous plan by the Colonial Singapore Improvement Trust. For more information click here [+]

July

Process and Fragments
(Some) National imperatives in Singapore. SKEW is part of OMA-OLIN's team for the Singapore Rail Corridor Competition. Singapore has always been a (home)base for Koon, Eunice and Darren, even though we have been studying, living and practicing abroad. Nonetheless, we have been tasked with researching and framing the conditions on-the-ground for the international team, and providing them with evidence - historical through to the contemporary - pertaining to issues as far ranging from heritage to constructed identities. Perhaps this constant switching back-and-forth between being from and in Singapore, and further out afield, has afforded us critical distance to approach the task at hand.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
This year’s ISPA concludes in Singapore, after a two-week research and study session in Hong Kong. In Singapore, students were invited to lectures by Kien To, Denise Tan, Iris Belle and Derek Chan, and visited diverse architecture firms such as DP Architects, ZArch Collaboratives, Ministry of Design and WOHA. The summer programme also seeks to expose students to the everyday in Singapore beyond the triumphalist narratives, by bringing them to the heartlands where most Singaporeans reside. Their studio project continues the research into hybrid blocks and podium-towers, with the Southeast Asian city forming a counterpoint to Hong Kong. The 2015 ISPA is supported by the Future Cities Laboratory (Singapore), Kangwon University and the Asian Urban Lab. The studio instructors include Lai Shun Lam, Kirk Mazzeo, Daniel Wilkinson and Piotr Winiewicz.

June

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Koon and Darren are co-directors of HKU’s International Summer Programme in Architecture. This year’s edition will start off with a two-week stint in Hong Kong, followed by a one-week trip to Singapore, with students experiencing the similarities and differences of both Asian financial hubs. Scheduled lecturers include Eric Schuldenfrei, Cole Roskam, Tat Lam, Eunice Seng, Jason Carlow and Dorothy Tang. Students will also visit different architectural firms, including davidclovers, Gravity, Urbanus and OMA HK. The density of both cities is the starting point for this programme. Students are tasked with looking at typologies that by definition are mixed-use. A guerilla tour will also bring students to the industrial areas right in the heart of Hong Kong, as well as to Shenzhen. The original Seoul leg was cancelled due to the outbreak of MERS.

May

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice and Koon present “Architecture of Artifacts: Excerpts of a Diaspora Manifesto” in a 3-day lecture tour co-organized by the University of Queensland, Monash University and University of Technology Sydney from May 5 to 7. The event starts at the Asia Pacific Design Library in Brisbane and ends at the Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) Caulfield Campus in Melbourne. See more here [+] and here [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Darren lectures on the "Architecture of Artifacts: Excerpts of a Diaspora Manifesto" at Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University in Suzhou on May 5 as part of the school's public lecture series.

April

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice co-chairs the session “Dwelling Asia: Translations between Housing, Domesticity and Architecture,” at the 68th Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Chicago, Illinois, Apr. 15-19 [+].

March

Community and Agency
Koon Wee leads a 35-strong contingent from Architecture Association Asia to Beijing, where they will further understand the urbanism and development of the Chinese capital. The workshop is from 5-10 Mar.

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice is the co-convenor (with C. Chu) for "The Speculative City: Emergent Forms and Norms of the Built Environment - an Interdisciplinary Symposium" at HKU, Mar 6-7 [+].

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice publishes "Common Ground: Reflections and Speculations on the Padang as Public Space" in Singapore Architect 1 (2015): 73-80. [ISSN:0218-7728].

February

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice presents “Transnational Utopia: Thoughts on the Diaspora in Lieu of a Manifesto,” at the Singapore Dreaming Conference, organized by Asian Urban Lab, Singapore, Feb. 6-7 [+].

January

Education and Knowledge Exchange
Eunice presents her paper, "The People's Park Complex: the State, the Developer, the Architect and the Conditioned Public, c. 1967-," at the 1st Southeast Asian Architectural Research Collaborative (SEAARC) Symposium, National University of Singapore, Jan. 8-10 [+].

Recognition and Awards
SKEW Collaborative has been included in the publication "50 Under 50: Innovators of the 21st Century," by Images Publishing. The jurors include Stanley Tigerman, Ralph Johnson, Marion Weiss, Jeanne Gang and Qingyun Ma.