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Cosentino Asia Announces Deep Dive in Design with Kelley Cheng Series
The Deep Dive in Design is a series of quarterly talks that will be hosted by Founder of The Press Room and President’s Design Award Recipient, Kelley Cheng, at the newly opened Cosentino City Singapore. As we gear up for a post-pandemic world, how would design strategies shape the new normal? The series aims to shine the light on all things design-related, enabling the designers of different genres to come together and discuss architecture, design and life.
With the opening of Cosentino City Singapore, which is designed to be a meeting point and multi-purpose exhibition space for designers, it was the perfect venue to host the design talks. This builds on C-TOP Design mission to support design professionals at all stages of their creative process.
To kickstart the first Deep Dive in Design with Kelley Cheng series, three guest speakers were invited to share their expertise and experiences revolving around Conservation in Architecture.
- Jerome Ng Xin Hao - an Architectural Designer and Educator with over 10 years of experience in producing unique and multi-faceted works.
- Ho Weng Hin - Co-founder of Studio Lapis: a Singapore-based architectural conservation specialist consultancy with diverse local and international projects.
- Jean-Francois Milou - Founder of studioMilou architecture
Jerome does architecture illustrations, where he adopts a speculative research method by utilising analog and digital tools to investigate narrative within space. He walked the audience through three conservation projects that he had worked on, such as the Deckham Hospice Care Home in UK. In every conservation project, he starts with a narrative and believes it is important to bring the narrative to the built environment and helps to relate it back to the users, public and the inhabitants.
Ho Weng Hin from Studio Lapis shared his experiences conserving the key monuments in Singapore which included South Beach, Capitol Development and St James Power Station. He illustrated how these renewed heritage buildings achieved a balance of recovering past architectural expression while introducing changes that meet today’s demands. Conservation is not about preventing change or freezing time; it is about taking a principled approach to allow change to happen in a way that is sensitive to the history and memory of the site.
Jean-Francois Milou, founder of studioMilou architecture, touched on the intricacies as his studio took on the restoration of National Gallery Singapore. He shared more than 12 examples of layering designs that were used in the restoration. The project had since won six awards, including the Architectural Heritage Conservation Excellence Award by Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore.
