Ling Siew May was born in Shanghai in 1937, separated from her family during the war and placed in an orphanage there, and reunited with her father in Singapore in 1948. She went to Nanyang Girls’ High School, then to the University of Adelaide, and in 1963 became the first Asian woman to graduate from it in architecture. In 1972 she and her husband Ong Teng Cheong founded the practice ONG&ONG, where she was a principal partner. When Ong became President of Singapore in 1993 she kept working, the first spouse of a head of state there to hold a job. Her last project, completed while she was terminally ill, was the new campus for her own school on Linden Drive; she opened it on 6 June 1999 and died seven weeks later.
