Architects reach for the skies

NAME a Singapore landmark building today and you'd be hard put to pick your favourite, although Marina Bay Sands with its three hotel towers no doubt would be a front runner.

Flashback 50 years and the skyline was vastly different. As veteran architect Goh Chong Chia, a director at Ong & Ong who has been practising architecture since 1972, puts it, when the British left Singapore, "they didn't leave us with very much".

Says Dr Goh, 68: "We had to develop our infrastructure, and there was a lot of substandard development in the form of slums and dilapidated squatter settlements."