PEOPLE
Ar. Tang Hsiao Seak
In school, Tang joined the boy scouts to meet new friends: instead he learned to build campsite gadgets, go green and be resourceful. At Sydney University (end of the 80’s), he learned architecture from educators and practitioners who had moved-on from the hippie movement into baggy clothes. Manoeuvering through the philosophies and manifestations of modernism, post-modernism and deconstructivism, he picked up lessons in contextual sensibility and environmental design principles, ie, the fundamentals of sustainability.
Starting a career in booming Malaysia in the 90’s upon graduating, was akin to charting the undiscovered seas of mass development and commercialism. It was a cycle of narrating placating stories to clients, overcoming red tapes scenarios, minding consultants and wrangling contractors, all simultaneously. Solace was found in the opportunities to work on projects of broad scale, ranging between 1:1 and 1:10,000 scale in drawings. He honed the skills in multiple disciplines from planning and urban design through architecture and interior to installations and product design.
If architecture required a gearbox, he would specify a manual over automatic - reasons being “involvement, feel and soul”.
Ar. Steven Ngu Ngie Woon
In summary, a “Bright Lights, Big City”, green affair. Steven spent his early years in a small green town and estate plantation of Sitiawan. Being made to read blueprints by his father in his teenage years, he became inspired and convinced his parents that with this ability and the love of drawing he could make a living. He then moved to the big city of KL to study architecture. Under the tutelage of influential architects using old-school methodology, he graduated from University Malaya in the new millennium, armed with new skills from the digital age. Working in the bright lights (of Garis studio), he was involved in a multitude of projects, that allowed him to develop a robust multi-disciplinary approach to designing the built-environment. Steven’s keenness in the exploration of patterns and space is echoed in his tenacity and passion for people-centric architecture.
Away from the bright lights he would take solitary journeys (albeit, sometimes with like-minded people), soul-searching and seeing the world through the aperture of an SLR lens - usually turn out to be ‘green’ in some way or rather.
