Richard Hassell is the Australian-born half of WOHA, the Singapore practice he founded in 1994 with Wong Mun Summ, whom he met while both were working for Kerry Hill Architects. Born in 1966, he trained at the University of Western Australia and later took a master’s degree at RMIT in Melbourne, then settled in Singapore in 1989 and has practised there since. WOHA credits every project to the office rather than to either founder, and Hassell has been as much the firm’s public voice on its central argument — that tropical density and greenery are not opposed — as its designer, sitting on the boards of the DesignSingapore Council and the Building and Construction Authority and holding the Seidler Chair in architectural practice at the University of New South Wales.
