Ken Yeang
Ken Yeang (6 October 1948) is an architect, ecologist, planner and author from Malaysia, best known for his ecological architecture and ecomasterplans that have a distinctive green aesthetic.
Yeang has completed over 12 bioclimatic eco high-rise buildings, several thousand dwellings (terraced houses), over two million sq.
His key built work include the Roof-Roof House (Malaysia), Menara Mesiniaga (IBM franchise) (Malaysia), National Library Singapore (Singapore), Solaris (with CPG Consult, Singapore), Spire Edge Tower (with Abraxas Architects, India), DiGi Data Centre (Malaysia), Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital Extension (under Llewelyn Davies Yeang, UK), the Genome Research Building (Hong Kong with ALKF & Associates), Suasana Putrajaya (Putrajaya, 2017).
Yeang's research and technical work is in ecological architecture and masterplanning, establishing the formal basis for design, focussing on the biointegration of the human-made with nature, creating hybrid systems as ‘constructed ecosystems’.
The swimming pool on the east functions as an evaporative-cooling device bring in the predominantly easterly breeze into the adjoining internal living spaces.
Professor Udo Kultermann (Washington University) credits him as the inventor of the 'bioclimatic skyscraper', The Mesiniaga Tower (an IBM Franchise, 1992) brought together earlier experimental bioclimatic ideas in a single built form, such as the placement of the elevator core as a solar buffers to the tower's hot sides, placement of toilets and stairwells with natural ventilation opportunities, adopting various solar-path shaped sun-shades, use of an evaporative-cooling pool at the uppermost level, the overhead louvred canopy as a framework for future PV cells, and the vegetated and stepped façade and recessed sky-terraces as interstitial semi-enclosed spaces for building's users.
The Solaris building (Singapore, 2008) brought together his ideas on ecological architecture with a continuous landscaped ramp and other experimental devices.
The Solaris' vertical linear park device led to his concept of the continuous 'green eco-infrastructure', a device that enables a vital ecological nexus between the built form and its surrounding landscape, bioregion and its hinterland, that became habitats and a crucial biodiversity and wildlife corridor in all his subsequent masterplanning and eco-city design work (e.g. the SOMA Masterplan in Bangalore, India) and in his architecture (e.g. the Spire Edge Tower, in Gurgaon, India, completion c. 2015).
The building features large 40m high 'public realms-in-the sky' as verdantly landscaped 'skycourt gardens', a ground plane as an 'open-to-the-sky' plaza for public festivals and culture-related activities.
Yeang worked on the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital Extension (London, UK) (completed 2011) as a green healthcare facility in a temperate climate.
His work on the development of a 'platform' for eco-master planning and designing eco-cities regards designing the built environment as 'a living system' that is both interactive and functional through the bio-integration of the 'four eco-infrastructural armatures' into an overall coherent system The approach provides an indeterminate framework enabling inclusivity of changing complex factors and technologies in a flexibility that allows for technological obsolescence while encouraging innovation.
This theoretical model continues to serve as the underlying guiding framework for his present eco-architecture and eco-master planning work.
The impact of Yeang's work on architecture is based on his patterns of biointegration of biotic constituents with the inorganic structure of the built environment.
The approach involves creating viable habitats within the development and then matching these with selected native fauna species whether for feeding, breeding or refuge to enhance local biodiversity.
In Yeang's oeuvre of design, built and theoretical work, his most important and instructive contribution is his advancing the macro ecology-based land use planning approach of the landscape architect Ian McHarg and in extending and articulating this from its macro urban regional scale to the micro level of architectural design at the scale of the built form using his biointegation patterns.
Yeang pursuit of eco-architecture and eco-masterplanning theories, concepts and ideas have been carried out in parallel with an exploration for an 'ecological aesthetic', in questioning "...What a green building and masterplan should look like?"
Yeang contends that an ecological architectural aesthetic should resemble a living system, looking natural, verdant and hirsute with nature and its processes visible in the bio-integration of the synthetic builtform's physical constituents (abiotic) with the native fauna, flora (the biotic constituents) and the environmental biological processes of the land.
He contends that much of existent architecture and masterplans that lay claim by other elsewhere to be sustainable are simply commonly-styled or iconically-styled builtforms stuffed internally with eco-engineering gadgetry and with occasional vegetation in its upper open courts.
Yeang contends that an eco-architecture and an eco-city should be 'alive' as a living system, analogous to a constructed ecosystem and not 'de-natured' nor look predominantly inorganic, artificial and synthetic.
This can be regarded as an emergent ecological aesthetic, where its shapes and forms have a nexus with adjoining ecosystems, which harmonise with the site's ecology, enhance local biodiversity, besides having other eco performance features such denying negative consequences, avert polluting emissions, be more energy and water efficient and carbon neutral than conventional buildings, and other eco-design attributes.
