Nanyang Girls’ High School, Linden Drive campus

Ling Siew May was in 1963 the first Asian woman to graduate in architecture from the University of Adelaide, and in 1972 she founded the practice ONG&ONG with her husband Ong Teng Cheong, where she was a principal partner. When Ong became President of Singapore in 1993 she kept working — the first spouse of a Singaporean head of state to hold a job. Her last project was the new Linden Drive campus for Nanyang Girls’ High School, the school she had herself attended, a Chinese-medium girls’ school founded in 1917 and by then moving out of its King’s Road premises. She designed it while terminally ill, stepping the teaching blocks down the sloping Bukit Timah site around open courtyards and naturally ventilated decks. She opened the campus on 6 June 1999 and died seven weeks later.