A bookstore set within Toyo Ito’s fluid, waterfront architecture responds with an interior rich in colour, texture and sculptural form. Inspired by Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring, the spatial narrative transforms the store into a landscape of quiet adventure and discovery. Like a Chinese garden, the design reveals and conceals views, creating moments of surprise as visitors navigate this sea of knowledge.

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Crater is an exploration of furniture as landscape, where function is expressed through subtle changes in topography across the table surface.

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An outhouse located next to an existing house serves primarily as a new home for three young adult children to stay close to their parents. The key functions of the house are organized simply as separate stacked volumes in different directions, with spaces created in between. The volumes are designed like pavilions in the garden; walking around the house, you are constantly connected to the surrounding landscape.

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The Singapore River Round Island Route project unfolds at a moment of pause during the pandemic, when the once-bustling heart of the city came to an unusual standstill. The lyrics of our much-loved National Day song read, “just like the river that brings us life,” evoking a Singapore River that has long been vibrant with activity. The project reimagines the river’s edges with new landscaping, cycling and pedestrian paths, strengthening connections between people and place. More than an infrastructure upgrade, it marks a moment of renewal, allowing the river to flow forward once again as a shared space of movement, memory and home.

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Inspired by reed plants native to the region, a triptych of towers rises beside Nantong’s main train station, subtly tilted in motion. The elevated podium frees the ground plane to form a new public realm, while its roof becomes a landscaped garden above.

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A landscape of irregularly shaped, seemingly randomly placed pearls informs the configuration of the buildings and terrain, with pathways gently stringing them together. The composition draws from Bahrain’s historical association with pearls, translating cultural memory into spatial form.

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The theme of the Singapore Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 is Urban Symphony, a tribute to Singapore, where a delicate harmony of cultures exists in a city-state. Designed as an interpretation of a musical box, the pavilion is an orchestra of elements – from the movements of the water fountain on the plaza, to the rhythm of fenestrations on the façade, to the interplay of sound and visuals across the different levels, to the mélange of flora in the roof garden.

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Singapore occupies a land area of 710 square kilometre. This ruler measures 71 square centimetre, which is exactly 1/10000000000 the area of Singapore. The ruler becomes not just a tool to measure the dimensions of an object; it relates itself to the dimensions of a place. It seemed an interesting idea to have an object so small as a ruler to have a dimensional relationship to Singapore. 71 square centimetre in area also resulted in a missing square on the ruler which perhaps may be filled up very soon, when Singapore continues to expand its land area through land reclamation.

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Dots + Crosses and Twink take inspiration from the Dot Pattern designed by Charles and Ray Eames for MoMA’s 1947 textile competition, reinterpreting the graphic motif as furniture.

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A moment of connection where two arches meet. Set within the landscape depicted in Chinese painter Huang Gongwang’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, the footbridge becomes a poetic dialogue between past and present.

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Space is captured through the delineation of boundary – a fine line that defines zones of ownership and creates a comfort zone where one feels secure, yet the very same device can also confine and limit. This duality is ironic: soldiers encased in perspex boxes are protected, yet trapped; parachutes serve as life-savers in the air, yet become cumbersome burdens on land. The collaboration between two artists from different countries became, in itself, a negotiation of boundaries, both physical and psychological – boundaries that defined, disappeared, blurred, reappeared and shifted.

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Drawing from Rem Koolhaas’s description of Singapore as a “Potemkin metropolis,” a city of all foreground and no background, the work reflects on our highly curated urban environment. In such a homogenised landscape, urban experience becomes scripted and uniform, risking the reduction of citizens to passive audiences of the same narrative. The installation responds by choreographing a single path through identical paper figures and repetitive imagery, echoing Koolhaas’s critique of individuality constrained within a controlled, manufactured spectacle.

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Blurring the boundaries between furniture and art, Flap Flap captures a suspended moment in time, like a landscape painting. Beyond function, a narrative unfolds within its composition.

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The Canopy Link at the Singapore Botanic Gardens Gallop Extension is a 200-metre elevated pedestrian walkway inspired by the organic meandering paths of the English Landscape Movement. Rising gently from the Bambusetum to six metres above Tyersall Avenue, it connects the Learning Forest to Rambler’s Ridge while offering changing views between the existing Singapore Botanic Gardens to the new Gallop Extension at different heights. Designed to appear thin and floating, the tapered deck and “seed”-profiled columns blend into the surrounding garden landscape.

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Foreign Domesticity is a reflection of the longing for connections in an increasingly disjointed world. Strings tie two sides of a divided surface, forming simple shapes that resemble houses or bridges. The composition also subtly depicts a triband commonly seen on many country flags, a symbol associated with liberty and nationalism. Paradoxically, this ‘flag’ is made using towel fabric, a domestic material that we use on a daily basis. There are countless loops on this fabric, which are like the innumerable people or voices in our everyday life.

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⊹ Projects completed at Kay Ngee Tan Architects