Big Thinking on A Small Island. The writings and ruminations of Tay Kheng Soon.

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 aesthetics 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.