WOHA New Forms of Sustainable Architecture

WOHA New Forms of Sustainable Architecture, Paperback, ISBN 978-0500025307 Published, 2022

Architecture was once seen more as an art than a science, more about show that substance. How amazing to see this evolution, and never more clearly than in the work of Wong Munn Sum and Richard Hassell’s WOHA. When people talk of sustainable architecture, it should be here they first look, to see what is possible on a global scale.

The pair and the practice have had six books written previously, yet this tome, at over 300 pages is not a list of projects but rather, as Bingham-Hall notes, a “mid-career assessment of WOHA’s oeuvre, but will also serve as a documentation of their (ongoing) proclamation of intent”.

A quick recap; Wong and Hassell met as students and began their practice in 1994. They each had strong, contrasting interests outside architecture, yet their pairing proved to be ideal. And this is where we pick up the story –to see their evolution from students to masters.

Self-sufficient cities, the ideal, requires a homogenous existence of sustainable building and a new vision of social urbanism where living close together is not a license to kill. Harmony, in the built environment and in the mind of man is a mighty ideal. And perhaps this book does have a touch of the weighty earnestness found in righteous circles, but there is no quibble about vision of WOHA.

“We are bringing radical ideas, but with a conscience. Even if our projects are never built, we have an equally important role as advocates … promoting practical strategies for mega-city sustainability.”

As you would expect the book is flooded with images of both built and dreamt creations, but also sketches and elevations that will satisfy the technical mind, and examples of more playful buildings such as the Oasis Downtown building in Singapore –cloaked not in a curtain of glass, but rather in bright red mesh which is rapidly being over shadowed by vines.

Indeed, having structures dominated, obscured and adorned by organic matter while maintain an integrity of design is what this practice is about. The balance. They ask why not design sky villages, sky schools, sky hospitals – why not go upward? Urbanisation needs to interact on better levels; WOHA has always taken on the challenge in a purposeful and articulated form. What we are seeing in this book is the passion of a practice that sees the sky is not the limit.

Bingham-Hall has produced a laudatory and rightly virtuous review of a global practice taking huge strides in designing a better way to live.

BELOW A major overview of Singapore’s most exciting architecture practice, documenting the complete corpus of WOHA’s pioneering sustainable and built work.