Eduard Kögel: How did you start your professional career?
Tay Kheng Soon: In the 1960s I was very politically active and in 1965, together with William Lim, we set up the Singapore Planning & Urban Research Group (SPUR).
EK: This was even before you founded Design Partnership?
TKS: Yes. Lim Chong Keat, who was one of the most influential architects in Singapore at the time, did not like SPUR because we were very critical of the designs of public housing. At the public exhibition Singapore’s Environment Past, Present and Future, we showed pictures of apartments realized by the Housing and Development Board (HDB)—the public authority responsible for almost all housing developments in Singapore—side by side with chicken coops. When expansion plans for the old Paya Lebar Airport were announced, in the 1970s, SPUR campaigned firmly against it in the press, saying that it was a disastrous project because it would have destroyed a quarter of the island’s surface with its flight paths. The new airport was then moved to Changi, at the eastern edge of Singapore, where it still stands now, occupying a portion of artificial land that has been reclaimed from the sea. These actions upset a lot of people back then. At that time, architecture and planning were generally seen as two separate things; this was absurd to me. With SPUR, I wanted to study the urban and environmental conditions that are specific to Singapore and apply this knowledge to architecture practice.
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