Ken Yeang

347

Ken Yeang : biography

1948 – N/A

Yeang continues to extend these early bioclimatic passive-mode design ideas to other low and medium-rise building types, and at other climatic zones now with other ecological factors.

Largely the result of these high-rise experiments and his book, The Skyscraper, Bioclimatically Considered (publ. John Wiley & Sons, UK, 1997) Yeang is credited as the inventor of the ‘bioclimatic skyscraper’ as a genre of the tall building type. University of Washington’s Professor Udo Kulterman states, “..Professor Ken Yeang is internationally renowned as the ‘father’ of the sustainable bioclimatic building..".

Green urbanism

Around the 1990s, Yeang worked on ideas for designing the high-rise typology as ‘vertical green urbanism’. He sought to reinvent the skyscraper typology as ‘vertical urban design’.These ideas are presented in his book, Reinventing the Skyscraper: A Vertical Theory of Urban Design (publ. John Wiley & Sons, UK, 2002), authored as a sequel to his earlier, The Skyscraper: Bioclimatically Considered (publ. John Wiley & Sons, UK, 1997)

The Retreat on Level 10 of the Singapore National Library Building. His ideas invert the high-rise typology to be designed as a ‘city-in-the-sky’, or what he refers as ‘vertical urban design’ which he first exemplified in his high-rise National Library Singapore (2005). The building features large 40m high ‘public realms-in-the sky’ in the form of two verdantly landscaped ‘skycourt gardens’, a ground plane as an open-to-the-sky public festival plaza (for cultural and book related activities) that bioclimatically serves as an evaporative cooling device to the public realm. Multiple upper-level sky-bridges link the building’s two blocks (one regular-shaped block containing the library’s collections and a ‘banana-shaped’ block for the library’s programming activities, both placed within a naturally-ventilated atrium covered by a louvered canopy roof over the entire built form serving as its ‘fifth facade’. Two multi-volume reading rooms are located at the sides of the collections block. At the uppermost level is a promontory viewing pod. The building’s built form has an organic geometry in Yeang’s on-going explorations to derive an ecological aesthetic. The building is well built without being elaborately detailed. The building is BCA-rated Green Mark Platinum.

Yeang’s ideas for an urban park-in-the-sky in the high-rise building type is manifested as a ‘vertical linear park’ in his Solaris Building (2011) at 1-North Singapore that is a benchmark in his green agenda for designing buildings as ‘constructed living systems’ (see his ‘biodiversity targets matrix’ in the GyeonGi Masterplan, Seoul, Korea). The building has an ecologically-linked vegetated ramp and pedestrian walkway that is 1.3 km in length as a linear parkscape, that is punctuated by sky garden terraces at each of the building’s corners, and further linked to a mid-level and to the uppermost-level roof gardens.

His ideas for a vertical linear park and vertical urbanism were first explored in his unbuilt EDITT Tower (Waterloo Road, Singapore). This idea is further developed in his Solaris building. The Solaris has an ‘ecocell’ (a green integrative device first presented in his masterplan for Kowloon Waterfront masterplan, Hong Kong). The Solaris has side ‘rain-check’ glazed-walls at the ground floor facades to a non-airconditoned space, with automated-operated glass-louvres over the central atrium with sensors to naturally ventilate the atrium and the ground floor. The building is BCA-rated Green Mark Platinum.

The Solaris’ vertical linear park device led to his concept of the continuous ‘green ecoinfrastructure’, a device that enables a vital ecological nexus between the built form and its surrounding landscape and hinterland, that became a crucial biodiversity component in all his subsequent masterplanning and ecocity design work (e.g. the iconic SOMA Masterplan in Bangalore, India) and in his architecture (e.g. the Spire Edge Tower in Gurgaon, India, completion c. 2013). This green ecoinfrastructure concept led to his developing a unifying platform for ecomasterplanning that is the "weaving together of the ‘four ecoinfrastructures’ into a unified system" (see below).