Big Thinking on a Small Island: The Collected Writings and Ruminations of Tay Kheng Soon

Tay Kheng Soon
Edited by Kevin Y.L. Tan and Alvin Tan

Tay Kheng Soon is one of Singapore's most important public intellectuals and thinkers. A pioneering architect of Singapore's post-independence era, Tay be­longs to a select group of individuals who literally put their footprints on Singa­pore's development - physically and intellectually.

He was Chairman of the Singapore Planning and Urban Research Group (SPUR) in the 1970s and later president of the Singapore Institute of Architects, receiving its Gold Medal in 2010. His design research extends beyond architectural scale to urban planning and finally to the global scale. Tay is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and a member of the World Ekistics Society, and founding Chairman of the Substation, the experimental centre of the Arts community.

Beyond thinking about suitable built forms for the tropics, and the aesthestics of design, Tay takes a holistic approach to planning the built environment and wrote prolif­ically about these ideas. This collection brings together, for the first time, Tay's writings on these and various other topics that occupied him in a lifetime of thinking, teaching, building and expounding. His range is vast, traversing subjects as diverse as outdoor education, urban morphology, town planning, national identity, regionalism, ageing in place and the political economy of design. 

Publication year: 2021
738 pp / 260mm x 260mm
Fully illustrated in colour throughout
Paperback
ISBN: 978-981-14-9098-9
Published by Equilibrium Consulting Pte Ltd