Richard Hassell
WOHA
Founding Director
Garden City, Mega City – Strategies for the 21st Century Sustainable City
The 21st century promises to be very different from the 20th century: we face global warming, unprecedented population growth, limited space and natural resources. So why are cities being planned using components that were developed in post-war Europe and America?
In this talk, WOHA Founding Director Richard Hassell will speak about the trajectory that WOHA’s projects have taken on from climactically appropriate designs, to skyrise greenery, to holistic designs that not only focus on the environment but also build and foster communities. He will share ideas on what the designers of hyper dense cities of the 21st century could and should be doing to make them great places to live.
Richard Hassell is the co-Founding Director of WOHA, an internationally-acclaimed architectural practice based in Singapore. He graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1989, and was awarded a Master of Architecture degree from RMIT University, Melbourne, in 2002. He has lectured at universities around the world, and served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, and the University of Western Australia. Together with Wong Mun Summ, he has mentored students under NUS’s Embedded Studio in Practice programme, anchored the University’s MSc in Integrated Sustainable Design Masterclass since 2011 and conducted a Design Studio at the Singapore University of Technology and Design in 2016.
Four monographs have been published on WOHA’s projects to date. WOHA launched a new book at the 2016 Venice Biennale, called Garden City Mega City, which shares strategies for the exploding mega cities of the tropical belt. In the book, WOHA show how integrated landscape, architecture and urbanism can improve quality of life within high-density environments. “Breathing Architecture”, an exhibition devoted exclusively to their works opened at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Germany in December 2011 and thereafter travelled to Taiwan in 2012-2013. WOHA curated the “Garden City Mega City” exhibition at The Skyscraper Museum in New York in March – September 2016, which also traveled to Mexico for the Mextropoli Festival from March – April 2017 and thereafter to the Austin Central Library in Texas from February – April 2018.
