Designer as Developer, Plus Sustainability Defining the Essence of Space

In the third of our national / international exporation of the themes, both commercial and creative, driving luxury residential development, we are delighted to welcome Soo K. Chan, principal of SCDA Architects, who has created projects in this market area on a huge scale all over the world, and, significantly, also acts as his own developer. 'My motivation to be a developer is to allow me to be pure as an architect', he says.  The practice's work in New York, India, Indonesia, Bali and Shenzhen – to name but a few – shows that he truly speaks an international design language. Mr Chan has a provocative take on green architecture: 'Beyond sustainability,' he says, 'there is the formal and spatial expression of architecture in context… As an architect, how do you distil the essence of place? How do you evoke a spirituality of place formally? I use green architecture to generate these feelings and to humanize spaces'.