In the following pages, we're as much interested in space as in the relationships between spaces. To encapsulate as broad an understanding of space as possible, we rely both on more classically rooted terminology that evokes ideas of space-such as procession, order, enclosure, transitions—and more contemporary terms like "spatial plasticity," a consideration of the relationship of spaces to each other and to the whole.
The space for living is the most fundamental, and by extension how we live together—within units, within buildings, within cities, and within the world—must be very carefully considered. Many notable architects in modern history have reimagined the future of residential space. Le Corbusier saw the house as a machine for living, while Mies van der Rohe brought in light through precision and assemblage, developing the curtainwall, and Frank Lloyd Wright strove for an integration of organic architecture and nature. We can learn from each of these precedents—some strategies work and some do not.
Over the years, SCDA has had similar opportunity to rethink high density housing, with projects in different locations with different climates, and with different budgets to test these ideas. It has urged us to examine what the most pressing concerns are, regardless of the site-specific parameters of each project.
With projects all over the world, we know that one singular strategy will never make for a successful solution. However, our basic needs are universal. We can rely on the fact that the quality of our spatial environments impacts our health: light and air are required for our wellbeing; and we cannot live in artificial silos, we need to be connected to nature in some way.
In the following pages, we have gathered 10 projects, spanning over 20 years, to explore how we design and put buildings together. Assessing one's own work is often a worthy and illuminating exercise. In past publications, we have felt the luxury of receiving outside perspectives. Aaron Betsky has characterized SCDA's practice as one suspended between emerging technology and different cultures, while Leon van Schaik has argued for a distancing from these dual realities. He instead suggests a utopian search for perfection-in each work, seeking the realization of a gesamtkunstwerk; no matter the context, practice makes perfect. It is not implausible that the two characterizations could be seen working in unison. While Betsky regards SCDA as a "ruthless and effective scavenger of whatever organizational principles" are deemed appropriate for the situation at hand, van Schaik observes how "messy reality is edited out" in our work; he states that our "idealism drives an architectural toolkit, comprising "orthogonal relationships between literal and phenomenal transparency of horizontal and vertical planes, the floating of rectangular volumes and tabula rasa recasting of the ground and water planes, and the creation of over-sailing sky planes." 5Both authors may be right in some way, I suspect. Certainly, SCDA was born as an amalgamation of movements and multiple localities, but it is also a consistent response to the plurality of demands and externalities that pervade commissioned work today.
Having designed single-family residences and high-rise towers, cultural institutions and commercial properties, a persistent interest in spatiality becomes clear in the range of work. In fact, as is evident in the following pages, clear traces of the spatial principles we experimented with in early residences can be found in our multi-unit housing structures.In examining our projects-completed, on the boards, and those that remained as sketches and ideas—I would propose that our work is intentionally not about singular definitions. Perhaps this approach is rooted in my education as an architect during an academically "permissive" environment in the 1980s, a moment defined by pluralistic tendencies, when we all found excitement and opportunism in a promiscuity of thought.
VI. On Order
I studied architecture in the 1980s, a period that presented myriad and complex ideologies ranging from the skepticism and irony of postmodernism to the chaos and fragmented nature of deconstructivism and post-structuralism. As a young student grappling with seemingly disparate teachings, I was drawn to classicism for its rule-based approach to architecture. Trained by rote, rigor, discipline, and order, I started my career in Allan Greenberg's office in New Haven. Order in classical architecture is an assemblage of parts, each subject to an established system of proportions and distinguished by column specificity, pulled together to bring buildings to life that radiate classic beauty and artistic integrity. The city of New Haven was where I found myself routinely constructing architectural columns on paper with the "correct" proportion based on Renaissance treatises, using compasses and French curves. We would discuss how to modify the entasis of a column, or how to exaggerate entablatures to express masculinity in buildings.
It was in 1987 that I first realized that the rule-based classical form was plastic; and was capable of combining beauty and utility, albeit through skillful manipulation.
Through classical practice, I had finally reconciled in my mind what had seemed, in academia, the dichotomy between the process-driven modernist idiom and rule-based classical practice. This plasticity of form, underpinned by an underlying structure and language, still holds true to our design process today.
Order continues to play a significant role in SCDA's approach to architectural design—order as organization, order as clarity, order as repetition, order as procession, and order as transition. These are foundational components of the classical language that we have distilled and incorporated into our design vocabulary. At SCDA, a clear and concise design vocabulary provides us with the creative liberty to design for qualities such as serenity and beauty. The phenomenality of space is felt as light enters and animates a room; as materiality, structure, and proportion combine to effectuate a reverberation of the senses. Architectural language-the language of space-speaks through an oscillation between harmony and tension.
Far from its implied rigidity, order can accommodate a phenomenological approach to design when integrated with repetition and procession. It was Vitruvius who described architecture as a combination of "durability, utility, and beauty," the framework for which is established by order.
VII. Soo K. Chan and Leon van Schaik in Conversation
Soo K. Chan This year SCDA celebrates twenty-seven years, and the exploration of spatiality has been a thread that runs through many of our projects, regardless of scale and location. From the very beginning, when I started my company, I was interested in the quality and classical organization of space and volume; how to create a sense of calmness and resolution in a space, but to subvert it by opening up corners and pushing out toward the landscape.
You and I have spoken about spatial thinking on several occasions. It was the subject of your essay for our first book, and you have taught and written about the practice of spatial thinking in your own books.
Leon van Schaik This is an area of focus in the Design Practice Research Program at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). We have a foundational ideogram for the program that depicts four kinds of scholarship: discovery, where we find new things; integration, where we relate the new things to our existing knowledge; application, when you work out how to do things; and dissemination, which is spreading it.
At Harvard University, a group has been studying creative individuals in every field. They have found that what creative people share is that they come from the margins. The reason this was interesting to the essay I wrote for your previous book was both your background, coming from Penang, and the way you have related to your peers.
For example, while you studied at Washington University and Yale, you worked together with those around you until you had a breakthrough-the moment you knew what your individual approach would be. During your master's program, you were already set on your journey and others perhaps could not recognize it or thought you weren't playing the game. But in fact, you were playing your game.
The creative person also seeks recognition from people whose opinion matters to them. I find it quite revealing to think about who you go back to for feedback. Are there any of your peers operating out of Singapore whose opinions matter to you or are you not seeking their insight?
SKC The latter, to be honest, because when I came back to Singapore after studying and working in the United States, I felt informally supported by a group of architects that were not necessarily mainstream.We were a group that was working at the same time and there was a certain clarity in what we were interested in. But we were each working in our own way and interested in our own things. We never got together to discuss a collective approach, but nevertheless, we were grouped in a few early coffee table books. I always felt like an outsider. I had not worked for some of the seminal Singaporean architects like William Lim; instead I was working for Architect 61 and working on projects on my own.
Lvs When you use the word "classical," are you talking about classical Bauhaus modernism?
SKC Yes, but also rule-based traditional classicism, because I was immersed in it for the first years of being a young architect, working for somebody without a computer, like Allan Greenberg. I would have to draw the orders and construct column-based proportions, which I wasn't thrilled about, but I think it served me well. I often look at that as an elemental vocabulary that I can always fall back on.
LvS In that case, you must have noticed a lot of perturbations going on around you at the time; the influence of highly expressive architecture like the Guggenheim Bilbao.
SKC It was not something that I was ever really interested in; I never felt attracted to it. At that time in school, there were different camps. Such expressionism was for the "cool guys" in the studio, while I was with the more "normal" group. Some were strictly Catholic, wearing bow ties, and with architecture that aligned with their traditional religious beliefs. I didn't feel comfortable being in that group either.
LvS This is a very telling piece of your history because, in reading about your experience growing up in Penang, I get the image of you absorbing everything around you. But you engaged your surroundings by abstracting them, and then looking for the essences that lay behind everything. So, instead of getting involved in the decoration, you concentrated on the sound, the texture, and the feel. I can see how, at a time when there were a lot of bow ties about, that the classical Renaissance would have been something to be plundered rather than to be understood.
Yet again, it seems that you were the young boy from Penang in the middle of Washington University and Yale, holding your own ground and saying, "I see what you're all doing, but this is what interests me."
SKC Unconsciously, though I was perhaps more cognizant of it in graduate school. At Yale, I took a studio with Robert Venturi, though he was rarely there because he had just won the National Gallery Sainsbury Wing extension on Trafalgar Square in London. In the studio, we were pushed to design in the manner of Venturi. My project was for a site in Paris, and I wanted to design it in a more traditionally classical way. At the same time, I had just visited an exhibition on the Viennese Secession and I bought books on Otto Wagner. To me, these works were almost Bauhausian, if you looked at the typography, the furniture, the mechanical louvers. I didn't see that as a departure from the Bauhaus. In fact, to me, they were coming from a similar foundation.
When I came back to Singapore, I got a house and the first chair I bought was not a Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe chair, but a black velvet chair by Josef Hoffmann. I showed it to all my architecture friends and it was ridiculous to them.
LvS You found a path, in the face of some ridicule.
SKC It makes me fashionable at some points and unfashionable at others. Another great influence for me was Michael Graves, because he was a scavenger of symbols and parts. I bought books on Biedermeier furniture, but rather than reading the history, I was observing the image. Once, I even made an abstracted version of a Biedermeier chair with Michael Graves influences.
These were strong influences on me, but when I returned to Singapore and began my own practice, I was exposed to different references, like the work of Geoffrey Bawa. And increasingly my focus shifted to opening up to the landscape.
