Everything put together by Chan Soo Khian looks modern but the award-winning architect is steeped in classics and tradition
AWARD-WINNING architect Chan Soo Khian is wearing a pair of impossibly well-cut grey trousers from Italian luxury label Prada.
PICTURE OF COOL: Chan Soo Khian wears clothes that have clean, simple lines, much like the buildings he designs. -- ST PHOTO: DESMOND WEEPaired with a white long-sleeved shirt from Calvin Klein and a pair of super-spiffy black leather shoes from Paris, he cuts a stylish figure.
His choice of clothes - his other favourite fashion labels being Jil Sander and Helmut Lang - embodies the same qualities as the buildings he designs: clean, simple lines that emphasise function and have a modern yet classical sensibility.
His spanking new office, a four-storey shophouse in Teck Lim Road, features a gallery on the ground floor that displays a scale model and large, colourful artist renderings of one of his current projects, the Alila Resort in Bali.
The just-completed Singapore High Commission in New Delhi, India (above), designed by Chan Soo Khian. -- PHOTO: SCDA ARCHITECTSIt also houses a mock-up of the resort's rooms, outfitted almost entirely with his new in-house furniture line, SCDA Collection.
So guests can admire the design of the resort while sipping cocktails from one of the daybeds and armchairs that grace the interiors.
Lounging on a deep-seated, dark wood chair he designed, he is a picture of cool. Throughout the two-hour interview, Chan, 45, is calm and considered in his responses.
He tells you he's in the midst of moving house from a colonial bungalow in the East Coast he's been renting for a decade, to a house he's designing off Holland Road.
It won't be 'hardcore modern', he says, but will include some signature elements of his design aesthetic, such as the prominent use of glass, stone and wooden screens. It will be furnished with, among other classics, a Mies van der Rohe daybed and a Castiglioni Arco lamp.
He chuckles when you tease him about his penchant for designing boxy houses with flat roofs, and admits his house will be boxy, albeit without the signature timber-trellised cover-ups.
'Why not a box?' he asks rhetorically.
'A lot of the houses are boxy because they are creating a courtyard. You arrange two, three boxes and the space that is left by what is created between the boxes is the courtyard. Besides, squares are efficient, it's what structure is.'
Asked to define his own style, he says: 'Basically I'm just a humanist and I'm classical in spirit. I think that the classic sense of space never left me, even though the way I put everything together is very modern.'
Malaysia-born Chan moved to Singapore in 1990 from New York, where he had been working.
The following year, he won a Young Designers Award in a competition organised by the then Trade Development Board, for a flat, interlocking candle-holder.
His firm, SCDA Architects - of which he is the founding principal and design director - has also been winning awards since it started in 1995. These include the URA Architectural Heritage Awards and the Royal Institute of British Architects Worldwide Award.
Last year, he won two inaugural awards: the Designer of the Year award for his distinctive tropical yet modern homes at the President's Design Awards and an SIA-Getz Architecture Prize for Emergent Architecture in Asia for contribution to new directions in Asian architecture.
He also designed the Toy Museum in Seah Street and is sought after overseas, counting the Hotel Lonudhuahuttaa in the Maldives, the Singapore High Commission in New Delhi and the OneKL condominium project in Kuala Lumpur among his projects.
The Urban Redevelopment Authority has also commissioned him to design a public space at Dhoby Ghaut, on an empty plot beside Istana Park. He is understandably tight-lipped about the project, but says it will be 'landscape-oriented'.
He has the endorsement of his peers too.
Mr Hans Bauer, 46, principal architect of HB Design, has known Chan for nine years and calls him 'a leading light for others to do similar works of high quality of design'.
'He's been very prolific and his projects are extremely rigorous, well-detailed and well-thought- through, using clean materials that require a high level of control,' he adds.
First project his own house
CHAN knew he wanted to be an architect from an early age.
Born the second of three children in January 1962 in Penang, he remembers being exposed to buildings - and the idea of building them - from a young age.
He says: 'It sounds almost cliched but I did grow up with a lot of building toys, such as Lego and model kits. At some point, I found that I was interested in making things.'
Both his parents worked in the banking industry. His father died 10 years ago and his mother, who is in her 70s, still lives in Penang. Both his siblings live and work here. Elder sister Wan Nee, 50, is a kindergarten teacher and younger sister Wan Teng, 42, works in a bank.
He attended Penang Free School where, he says, he was a good student and was even nominated to be a prefect.
'But I was not exactly abiding by the rules most of the time,' he says with a cheeky grin. 'So I was one of only two prefects who weren't confirmed.
'I drew caricatures of teachers and passed them around, and I always arrived a little bit late - I still tend to be late, but I try not to be.'
Indeed, he was rather indifferent about being 15 minutes late for this interview.
He went to Washington University in the United States straight after taking his O levels in Penang. After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in architecture, he went on to get his professional degree, a Master of Arts in architecture from Yale University.
He graduated in 1987 and practised for two years in New York with the prestigious firm Kohn Pedersen Fox.
He came to Singapore in 1990, when the firm was awarded a project here. Later that year, he joined Singapore firm Architects 61, and stayed there until he started SCDA - which stands for Soo Chan Design Associates - in 1995.
He declines to talk about money or turnover, but today, the firm's award-winning portfolio of works includes not just private homes but also condominiums, holiday resorts and the interior of Rang Mahal restaurant and the now-defunct Song & Kelly boutique.
His first project was his own house in Koon Seng Road, an old shophouse that he converted into a modern tropical haven.
'People liked it and I started doing others in Emerald Hill and Cairnhill and that's how the practice started - from the attic of the house,' he recalls.
Asked if architecture is a lucrative career, he says that it 'rolls with the times and economy'.
Fortunately for him, the property market continues to be white-hot.
He says it's not easy to make the jump from houses to high-rise condominiums - the latter being what an architect needs to design to hit the big time.
'You need some breaks. Mine was probably in 1999 for SC Global's The Ladyhill or Lincoln Modern,' he says.
Both projects won awards in 2005. The Ladyhill won the Gold Medal in the multi-family residential category of the Miami + Beach Bienal International Competition and the Lincoln Modern clinched the international award in the Royal Institute of British Architects Worldwide Awards.
Ask him if it ever gets boring working for a regular client - in this case, upmarket property developer SC Global - and he says: 'They demand a certain quality and standard and we enjoy working with them. Underlying it, we share common ideals in getting it right.'
That's not to say he has always gotten it right throughout his career. He has some projects he'd rather not name but 'hide and hope nobody really sees them'.
But he is hard-pressed to name a favourite work of his.
'They're all like your own kids, they're all yours, even the bad ones,' he says, grinning.
Speaking of bad architecture, he had said in a previous Straits Times article that Singapore has 'too many badly proportioned neoclassical houses, overtly Balinese houses and period houses copied from other countries'.
Citing German-American architect van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion, Rome's Pantheon and the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto as some of his favourite buildings, he says: 'Neoclassical buildings have rules, you know, like proportions and ratios. What bugs me most is that some houses look wrong because I know what is supposed to look right. True classical buildings have a lot of strength and power, but those are caricatures of the original.'
He adds: 'But thankfully, that's in the past. I think everyone is now averse to anything classical. In that sense, I think the sensibility for me is to return to classical because that's what everyone doesn't want now.'
He has high hopes for Singapore architecture, and says the industry is enjoying a higher profile in recent years because of good talent.
'We don't need to brand our architecture as Singaporean, we just need to brand Singapore as a place of good design.'
He adds: 'If you always want to ask 'What's Singaporean about this?', you'll end up with a World's Fair of Raffles Hotels or trishaws or Merlions.'
What's important
CHAN perks up when you ask him to choose three words to describe himself.
Hmm, he ponders aloud, before responding: intuitive, decisive and passionate.
He is intuitive because he sizes people up quickly based on a 'vibe', such as when hiring staff. He is decisive out of necessity as he has to make many decisions on any given day, and is passionate because he wants to 'get it right, and will find whichever way to do so'.
How about in the bedroom, you ask, hoping to elicit a more animated response.
But he stifles an impulse to chuckle, saying: 'I can't answer that, it's very private - but you can imagine. You could say I'm intense and focused.'
The divorced father of three boys says the most important things in his life now are intangible ones, like change and time.
Now newly engaged, he says: 'The early years were all just study, work and trying to achieve. Now, I think finally the less tangible things are important, like spending time with people who are dear to you.'
He lets slip that his fiancee, whom he refers to as Ling but will not say more about, sometimes travels with him to visit his projects overseas or 'she won't see very much of me'.
And yes, he always travels Business Class.
He says matter-of-factly: 'Of course I have to, it's work. When I get there I need to be fresh. Even if I go on long, personal trips, I definitely have to. To get up and go all the time is really hardship.
'I have so many frequent flyer miles that I have more than enough to redeem free flights for everyone.'
You wonder if he has any spare time to indulge in hobbies. Yes, he says. He enjoys reading and photography, and holds a black belt in taekwon-do.
By the end of the interview, you realise that under the boxy, modern exterior is a man steeped in classics and tradition - the kind who likes to wear suits when he is overseas and is not currently living with his fiancee because 'we're not married yet'.
Another side of him also emerges when his picture is being taken after the interview.
Gone is the reserved, soft-spoken, thinking architect in the chair. In his place is a booming art director telling the photographer how he would like his picture to be taken.
He says: 'This looks weird', 'Can we do this instead?' and 'Doesn't it look funny like that?' and declares he is uncomfortable each time he has to look into a camera and smile.
And there is the drive, the perfectionist streak that makes him the sought-after architect that he is.
'Every decent architect has to be a little bit of a control freak,' he admits.
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