A Multi-Ply Approach in Design

Jacqueline I guess we were both. We both met in architecture school, as undergrads. So we have always been doing work alongside our relationship. And it has evolved from being students together to working together in bigger practices, to then starting our own firm. So it's always gone hand in hand, ever since we met, so yeah, it's a life journey.

Jacqueline Not perfect. But I'll let Victor tell you all about it.

Victor Yeah, I think we try to acknowledge each other's interests and strengths. And also, we are aware of our own weaknesses. So I think, naturally, we have found a kind of best-fit situation to work together and try not to have too many overlaps. When we were working separately in different offices when we first started out in our professional life, even though we were not working together, we always had conversations around architecture and design, trying to learn a bit more from each other, opening up to each other about our concerns at work and problems that we may face. And then through that kind of opening up of our thoughts and sharing of issues and experiences…we try to also find out a bit more about each other professionally, in terms of our own distinct interests in the field of architecture.

Jacqueline Yeah, so I think after a while, you kind of develop a little bit of shorthand with each other, especially when it came to putting together works for our own practice. That came in very, very helpful because we are so used to working together, working with each other's train of thoughts that it could almost be quite a seamless thought process that develops through the entire design journey of any projects that we are working on together. So I think we dovetail quite a lot in in our responsibilities. It's a little bit like a relay match in a way, where one person starts something and then it just gets continued by the next person. So far, I think that has worked pretty well.

Jacqueline Erm...smooth...hahaha

Victor I think we’d like to think that we'll get there in the end.

Jacqueline Hahaha. Yeah

Victor This really depends on how long that process takes. But I would say it's been fairly smooth, I guess. Through the years that we've been working together, I don't recall any major disagreements over certain stages of the project, or in terms of where ideas came from, because I think being partners as well, we were, we are exposed to the same kind of life situations and experiences, as much as we have separate kind of experiences. But at the core of it, we do have very similar kind of outlook in life. And perhaps that’s also why we got together in the first place.

Jacqueline It's a question that we asked ourselves all the time. But I think for me, definitely this idea that space is something that is quite ubiquitous, and it's quite egalitairan; it shouldn't really belong to a very small subset of very rich people. So good space is something that we try to do throughout the works that we create, and it can be something very small up to something very big. But I think what we try to always have at the core…what we really want to do is to see if space can be the factor that changes how people are able to live in a certain way or to operate or work in a certain way. So that's, that's something that is quite important for us.

Victor I guess for me, growing up, I was interested in drawing as well as making things, taking things apart and putting them back together, so on and so forth. And growing up without having family [members] in this profession, in this trade, you're really just hearing from what people say about architecture being the perfect blend of the arts and sciences. So I just naturally, you know, latched on to that concept. And when it came to university, I just went for architecture, to try and, you know, satisfy both the creative interest that I have in things as well as looking at things in a very rational way. So yeah, it's the age-old cliche that architecture is really at the crossroads of the arts and sciences.

Victor Maybe I can answer this first. I think your views and your attitudes towards looking at what architecture really means and what architecture encompasses really changes from when you were a student, fresh out of school, still very naive, and you know, very inspired by things around you and what you see. And then now…working through the ranks of getting experience professionally, working with various practices, and then eventually thinking about setting on your own and being autonomous in that sense, and creating your own products and spaces and buildings or whatever.

I think it has been quite a change, a big change for me. Especially when you are running a practice now, and the more kind of real-world issues, the whole practical side of running a practice. And then the more pragmatic aspects of making architecture - dealing with budgets, dealing with people, dealing with clients, dealing with often conflicting factors of a project, and then having to mitigate those differences and find a way to negotiate the process. I think these are the things that you gradually, and gradually understand that they are all part and parcel of constraints, and inputs to help shape and enrich the design process. And I think we do try to embrace that because we believe at the end of the day, the outcome of the design is really a confluence of responses to these very conflicting kinds of needs. We like to think that we pay a lot of attention to try to mitigate these differences, and then to try and come up with a design that is in a way, quite responsive to such challenges.

Jacqueline I think what we try to do throughout the years is - as what Victor said - to kind of distill the most important aspects of each of our clients’ requirements and maybe also the site requirements etc. And I think we have been quite fortunate because we have worked on quite a number of projects outside of Singapore, as well as within Singapore. So I think it translates quite well through our different experiences with different clients from different parts of the world. And the essence of how we then talk about our projects can transcend, sort of, social and economic boundaries I think, or geographic boundaries of what it actually means to build in those countries. I think in that sense, it's quite rewarding because it's still able to meet what their requirements are even though we don't really know the context that well.


So I think whenever we embark on a new project, we try to see as much as possible what these requirements are and try and distill it down to some very simple rules, which we then subscribe to very, very rationally and religiously through the whole design process.

Jacqueline Yeah. Okay, so I think modulated form came about because…we've always been quite a small team. We never really went beyond like a four to six number size of our practice.

Jacqueline Yes, I think it was very intentional. We both worked in one of the largest architecture offices in Singapore before we set out our own practice. So I think we knew that we didn't really want to be a lot bigger.

But we also didn't want to limit ourselves to doing smaller scale projects just because our team was very small. So I think as part of that strategy of creating that logic between how do you then scale something up from what we can handle as a team would be to create modulated forms that then can be aggregated and to be scaled up to a certain size, and to be able to then spend as much time as as we need to make it work. So, in a sense, it was a bit of a strategy also to then talk about the most essential space for every project, because that then becomes the core space that could then be modulated to then be aggregated.

Jacqueline Yes, that's correct. Maybe just to give you an example. We previously worked on 450 units of affordable housing in Kenya, in Africa. And how the modulated form method worked there was that all 450 units were derived from a single plan. So it wasn't like there were so many different variations, but the complexity came about in how they were being put together and how they were being combined and organized in, on the site itself. So I think we quite enjoy doing those scale shifts, but with a very intentional limitation that we set ourselves. I think a lot of things that we do actually comes from a very limited...we tend to try to limit ourselves to a few moves such that I think eventually it forces a certain invention to take place...yeah, so it would be something quite surprising at the end of the day!

Victor I think it’s also a way in which we try to economise our practice, in our design process, because we have always been a very small team, very lean. We really have to work with whatever resources that we have. So this method or whatever word you want to call it, it's just a way that we have been working very naturally at first, and then when we look back, we realise that actually the things that have changed are not much, you know. We come up with something and then in order to create variations, we just make some subtle changes. The key is in how we then combine things together. In a small project that can work, but it also allows us to get a foot into working on larger scale projects where we are really just working with smaller parts of the of the bigger picture all the time. And it gives us a bit more confidence because then we can work through the small to the big, rather than starting with something very big and you then struggle to break it down and to design all parts of it. So it's really, like Jacqueline says, a scaling process as well. There's obviously a lot of repetition but we are aware of that and trying to develop ways to create variations within the repetitions. And I think in terms of the outcome, it's also in a way trying to gear towards making things that look like they belong in a family when they have been combined, rather than have things that may not kind of work in continuity with each other. And the fact that they change…we feel that it's very interesting to look at things…how the how the shape or how the form changes, it kind of has a relationship…or you can trace it really back to the first first shape or the first iteration of it.

Jacqueline And I think also it stemmed from us always having to work with our contractor partners. From the very start - even when we were working in London - we work very closely with the builders, the people that actually build our projects. And I think the modularity, and the fact that everything stemmed from a root, sort of like a family…so they're all family of parts. So it makes it much easier to describe to the person that's going to be building it. And I think it's also very nice that they then have a lot of confidence in building it, because it's not trying to digest a huge project, but they're actually digesting it in bite-sized chunks, that they can then replicate. And so that became like the modal operators for us for all our projects. It's very easy to then talk to the contractors and the people who will be building it in these parts.

Jacqueline Hahaha. I think one of the main reasons was the autonomy…the ability to gravitate towards certain project types or certain projects, genres that we feel quite passionately about. I think inevitably if you're in a bigger firm, you have to deal with a huge spectrum of clients from the super commercial, all the way to very bespoke sort of clients. And I think because we have always wanted to be quite…I don't know why but we seem to gravitate towards clients who are not very commercial in nature, almost [at] the opposite spectrum of of commercial. So we have done schools. We have done quite a number of schools. We have done quite a number of spaces that are more for, kind of collaborative workspaces rather than developer-led sorts of projects. Somehow, we gravitate towards those projects, and more of those sort of projects seem to come to us. That's partly the reason why we decided to set up on our own, so that we can have a choice of what sort of projects that we wanted to take on.

Victor I just wanted to add on that it could also be more of an intrinsic motivation to become, you know, owners of your own practice. I think the traditional model of an architecture firm, at least for me personally, when I was first exposed to architecture and throughout my learning journey, was really looking at architects that have their own practices as a model. So being not very adventurous and also, maybe through a personal kind of prejudice, I guess we do share the same position, with the same perspective…we know that eventually, we would want to do something on our own, and therefore, set up on our own to have a practice. The years that we've spent working with other practices and professionally was really for us to be very sure that we would not want to stay and work in a corporate practice or to work with somebody else, but really to drive us or to motivate us further to creating our own practice.