'It's not easy being green'

TO be a good architect, sometimes it means not building anything at all. And it is something that Kenneth Yeang is wont to do if a client's architectural aspirations are not quite in line with his own. "If you ask me to do a building with a full curtain wall in glass facing the heat from the west, I will not do it. You have to learn to say no," adds the Malaysian architect resolutely.

It is with such fortitude that the architect, together with his firm T R Hamzah & Yeang, has been able to design some of the most climatically responsive and environmentally sustainable buildings in Asia including the iconic Menara Mesiniaga in Malaysia which was completed in 1992 and built at a time when sustainable design was still more theory than practice.

Now, with over 200 built projects to his name, Dr Yeang is considered one of the pioneers in sustainable design and is the winner of several awards, the most recent being Green Architect Lifetime Achievement Award given for the first time by the Building and Construction Authority (BCA)/Singapore Green Building Council.