Ken Yeang

HB: You’ve pioneered ecological design in Asia and paved the way for transformation of the design industry. What, in your view, is the importance of ecological design in Asia, and what does it demand of the designer?

KY: What we as human beings do is that we go on the earth and any part of the land, we fragment the earth into patches, into little pieces, and this destroys the habitat, the fragility of the ecosystem.

What I try to do is I reconnect nature, make nature whole again, not just within buildings but between buildings and the landscape. This is what we as human beings should be doing.

Our built environment is not just urbanism or buildings, but includes everything that we make as human beings. Right now, it is so distant and remote from nature that it is the cause of contamination, pollution and devastation
of the environment. Our built environment has to become like nature. That is, it has to have the properties and attributes of natural systems. So redesigning is not just about design. It means remaking and recovering our natural environment; it means reinventing what we do with it.

“Ecological design doesn’t start with designing buildings… What we should be doing is designing Green infrastructure, because once the infrastructure is Green, anything you add to it or connect to it makes it easy to become Green.”

HB: What impact can architecture have on the challenges Asian cities are facing today? How many ecological buildings can add up to create a real impact?

KY: For me, ecological design doesn’t start with designing buildings, because the impact of buildings is incremental, it’s piecemeal. They just do not contribute towards enhancing the environment. What we should be doing is designing Green infrastructure, because once the infrastructure is Green, anything you add to it or connect to it makes it easy to become Green. When you start incrementally at the other end of the scale, designing Green buildings without Green infrastructure, if it’s connected to the grid and the source of energy to the grid comes from burning fossil fuels, then it makes total nonsense in designing a Green building, or trying to design ecologically. If you want to be ecologically effective, you need to design at the regional scale, to design the structure that determines the physical systems of our built environment. We should look at it in terms of the totality of everything we do on the planet. So ecological design for me starts with infrastructure.

“Our social, economic and political systems are infrastructure, so we have to integrate this human infrastructure with nature’s infrastructure. That to me is the fault in most of these accreditation systems because they see human society as a very small factor; or worse, as indoor air quality. It’s really about human habits, behaviour, aspirations and ideology.”

“We have now reached what is called the ‘race and rescue’ mission stage. We have to rectify what we’ve done, to recover and rejuvenate the natural environment. This means reinventing what we do with the natural environment. Ecology has to drive the process and output of design.”