Profile: Chang Yong Ter

About Chang Yong Ter : Chang Yong Ter's greatest contribution to the field of architecture is in the expansion of the architectural language related to the typology of landed residential dwellings in tropical Singapore. He offers a unique vision on the forms and contents of each house he designs, often with radical departures from local precedents and the norms that prevail on each type of dwellings; be they detached, semi-detached or terraced houses. And yet, their unconventionality is never inappropriate to their context, but are like delightful surprises that enlarges the possibilities available to the art of house-dwelling.

Landed residential architecture has always been fertile grounds for architectural expression and experimentation. Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Glenn Murcutt and Geoffrey Bawa have begun and sustained their architectural careers with ideas germinating and tested from their prolific design of houses for individual clients. This means that their houses are particularised and customised to a specific set of family, free from the capitalistic, consumerism ethos of mass-produced housing, and advocating a fresh take on residential designs. As a body of work, the houses envisioned by these architects have come to embody a cultural identity of a place over time, although they would have been revolutionary and trend-setting in their infancy.

Taken as a body of work, Yong Ter's designs for landed houses have been ground-breaking and rewarded with a long list of awards and media recognition. They defy conventions and offer an alternative way to accommodate and express the rituals of family living. He is not a stylist, subjecting his designs to a particular kind of look, and adhering to it through various incarnations with different clients and settings. If there is a style, it is a subversive one, a means of probing fundamental assumptions, a freedom from rules, even aesthetical ones. It is the intellectual freedom of an emergent voice, home-grown and uniquely his own, linked to ideas of climate, local flora and relevant rituals and needs of the family each house is meant to hold. His is a search for higher meaning, of the design of an architecture that not only serves as a backdrop appropriate for the rituals being played out by the inhabitants but that also transcends it. Superfluous forms are rejected in favour of the simple or essential forms. Spatial volumes are varied and framed, nature and materials are blended and often left in their natural state, without adornment or varnish. And natural light and the movement of air are choreographed with care.

Just like the residential architecture of the great masters, Yong Ter's residential architecture may appear raw and unprecedented at first, but in the years to come and with a growing body of distinguished awards, his body of work will very soon be acknowledged as one that will define an esteemed corner of architectural identity in the tropical region.

 

Good design deserves great recognition.

A' Design Award & Competition.