Biography — Wong Mun Summ

Mr Wong Mun Summ Member, Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize Nominating Committee Founding Director, WOHA Architects Singapore

Mr Wong Mun Summ is the joint founding director of WOHA, one of Southeast Asia’s best known and most awarded architectural practices based in Singapore. Wong Mun Summ graduated with Honours from the National University of Singapore in 1989 and is a member of various Design Advisory Panels in Singapore.

Wong Mun Summ formed WOHA as a partnership with Richard Hassell in 1994. WOHA’s architecture is notable for its constant evolution: no two buildings adopt the same ‘style’, as each project constitutes a specific response to the potential of the programme and the site. Environmental principles have always been fundamental to WOHA’s designs.

Since inception, the partnership has won a large number of local awards and international awards such as the 2007 Aga Khan Award for Architecture for their first tropical high-rise tower, 1 Moulmein Rise in Singapore. The Met, a high-rise residential tower in Bangkok, Thailand, was awarded the 2010 International Highrise Award and 2011 Lubetkin Prize from the Royal Institute of British Architects. A travelling exhibition devoted exclusively to their works opened at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Germany, in December 2011, and two substantial monographs – WOHA: The Architecture of WOHA and WOHA: Selected Projects Vol. 1 – have already been published.

Together with Richard Hassell, WOHA conducted a Design Studio at the Singapore University of Technology and Design in 2016. WOHA exhibited an invited, solo exhibition at The Skyscraper Museum in New York in 2016. They have also participated at the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennale. In conjunction with their installation in Venice, WOHA launched a new book, titled "Garden City Mega City", which shares strategies for the burgeoning mega cities of the tropical belt.

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