Going Beyond the Bounds

Boon When I was studying architecture, the idea of running my own studio was a clear ambition, and the path towards that requires that I work for experience—first in London then in Singapore, before I found the right opportunity and timing to start up Eco.id Architects.

Calvin Starting a company has always been on the back of my mind; so even in school, in university. It happened sort of by chance when somebody offered us to do a project. The client offered to do a project, but the condition was that I had to set up a company to do that project, so because of that we set up the office.

Calvin I met Boon when we were both in Officer Cadet School in the army. Boon was always a creative type, but I never knew that he would do architecture. So it came as a surprise to me later on, years later, when he said “Oh I'm going to be doing architecture in Oregon”. And then of course, I spent six months diddling around not going to school yet, so I was half a term behind him, but we eventually went to the same place.

Boon Because our educational paths were in parallel, were very similar, and having met in the army, there were never any overt plans, but the idea of practising together was something at the back of our minds; it was never planned in a kind of strategic way, it happened naturally.

Boon Definitely. I think one’s education and time away from home are formative both from a personal point of view but also in the work I do. It isn’t so much the physical or technical nature of what I learnt from work, it is a combination of, obviously, exposure to a much broader arena of arts, architecture, creative fields, in the places I’ve been to, but also interactions with different cultures because the practice of architecture is always contextual; so it is the context of a specific location, cultural response. And in the work we do now all over the world, that kind of subtle training in dealing with different cultures has been very relevant. We apply ourselves in many different ways depending on location, client, personality, and I think my time away was definitely useful in setting us up for this kind of work.

Calvin Well I think it gave us a different sort of viewpoint on how design is done. But I think the entire experience of studying elsewhere in the US and the UK really made the difference in how we approach our projects.

Calvin I think the challenge was paying ourselves. (Laughs) In the early days we were anchored with one hotel job and several house projects, so as most people who start an office would be doing—a lot of residential work. But then eventually once we had one or two projects already under our belt, then things started to take off. So it wasn’t really difficult.

Boon When we first started our work, we were always looking for an ability to pay ourselves. I would say the business side of the practice is not something you learn in school right, so it is unfortunate. Being a doctor, lawyer, architect, the university never prepares you for the reality of the business part of it. And that’s the most difficult. It may be anything from how you write a contract between you and a client, how you collect payments, how you plan cash flow to be able to pay yourself and staff. So those were very difficult things you learn as you move along in work.

Boon Yes, yes.

Calvin We had some long term plans to grow the company organically. I think we have done some of that, although I don’t think we have been completely successful in opening offices overseas. But I think we hit most of the KPIs.

Boon I think we are trained in a certain way, I would call it the modern school of design. And personally, I would consider myself a modernist through and through. But of course, modernism as an architectural language is plural, and that’s evolved. For example, when I first started working for a firm in London, they were high-tech modernists of the late 80s era, and that type of design instilled in me now a very disciplined, process-driven solution to architecture. But when I came back to Singapore, that stylistic vocabulary wasn’t applicable; it evolved. But still, the ethos of rationality leading to aesthetics and proportions is still very relevant, and still informs our work to this day. I would say that it has evolved through time, but there is a fundamental sort of foundation of modernism that guides our design.

Calvin (Our first job) was purely on a referral by an old classmate. The first couple of jobs were basically just by referrals.

I think the running of the business is sort of instinctive to both of us, but I did learn a lot of things because I worked at Akitek Tenggara, and I worked at Nikken Sekkei, and those working experiences sort of shaped how I would run a company.

Boon The step that we have to take when we leave the security of employment and go into private practice is something that is very uncertain. You leave on the back of maybe one or two very small residential jobs with no certainty of how the next job is going to come. I recalled that we came out to do a hotel project that was substantial enough to have given us some degree of security for maybe a couple of years, but the reality is that the job stalled, and in its place, we had other small residential projects that came in; and over time, one job done well leads to a recommendation to the next job.

So, again, in our type of work, we can’t advertise. By professional regulation, you cannot advertise for your services, and it comes by way of referrals; if you do one good job, you get the next job. That was really the way we grew. Obviously, now that we are a far more established practice, our speciality—particularly in residential and hospitality, which is hotels—means that we get references from operators, from clients, for this type of work.

Calvin That was in Indonesia, in Manado. It never got built eventually because of the Asian crisis in 1996, but then we moved on to other things like the Metropolitan Hotel in Bangkok, and the W in the Maldives.

I think in the business, there is something called luck as well. So after we finished the Met (Metropolitan) Bangkok, we found that people liked it, and so we had a lot of inquiries, especially for hotels.

Calvin As you know we are quite specialised in doing hotels, and when we work on hotel projects it’s not really what you want; there are a whole bunch of other people that need their wants to be met. So the first one is the client who is paying for the construction, and then you have the operator, and on the operator’s side there are guys who do branding—in terms of the brand identity of the hotel—guys who do ops and all that. I think that the entire process is really collaborative, you have to take everybody’s opinions and then come up with a solution for the design. So it's not really what you want, but what the project requires.

Boon Yes. I think first of all, clients come to you for your skillset. So if they think that they like our type of work—that is more modern, more minimalist, sort of, whatever it is—that’s the starting point. But obviously, clients have their own idiosyncratic demands that sometimes we don’t always agree with. Hence I think part of our profession is developing this EQ and the communication skills to be able to satisfy some of the client's wishes, to guide them towards what we think is a better solution, and there is no clear pathway to that.

It is kind of a fuzzy logic approach where ultimately you have an end game where you want to make sure something is built rationally, beautifully, but still practically; and as a good architect, you have to juggle all those pressures. I think at some point, if you do that well, a client would be satisfied with the result.

Calvin Well I think the teams are still small. Each team is maybe 10, 12 people, and I think that working conditions are quite optimal and quite intimate because you get to speak to people directly. We don’t play golf, we don’t really market; most of the work comes by referrals still. We’re kind of both still deeply involved in the design process. We’ve established a sort of SOP on how to work—especially with the overseas offices, how we send work out to them, and how we guide the design.

Boon Yes, so as we grow larger, it is really because we take on a new nature of work: Larger-scale projects, multiple locations, require us to have a broader footprint to be able to service these jobs, and part of that game is that you have to then devote time to management.

Calvin is a very good big-picture manager, and I think getting that infrastructure managed well is as important as the actual work we do because if you don’t have your resources organised well, you cannot service these very high demand jobs that take two to three years to unfold. And back to this question of do I miss it—yes. I think ultimately, we still love having a hand in design. I think as we settle management properly, and that is running smoothly, we are then able to devote time to what we do best and what we love to do, which is actually to get involved in design. I think now I find that I can spend more time working on concept design while knowing that the team is in place to be able to execute it smoothly and to implement it.