Lim Chong Keat
Datuk Seri Lim Chong Keat (1930– ) is regarded as one of the most important architects of Singapore and Malaysia. His firms produced seminal architecture of the post-independence period, including the Singapore Conference Hall & Trade Union House, the Malaysia-Singapore Airlines Building (in Singapore), and the Negeri Sembilan State Mosque (in Seremban). A gifted designer in the Modern tradition, Lim worked on diverse projects from furniture to urban planning. Within his profession, he was influential as a leader, educator, and writer, both locally and internationally before his retirement. Lim has been a champion of the arts and heritage, and is a supporter of indigenous peoples in the region. Most remarkably, he has reinvented himself as a botanical researcher and conservationist since the 1990s.
Mr Lim Chong Keat (far left), who designed the Singapore Conference Hall, showing then Law And Health Minister K. M. Bryne a model of the building in 1962. Photo source: The Strait Times.
Lim was born into an eminent Straits Chinese family. His father, Dr Lim Chwee Leong, was a physician and community leader in Penang, while his eldest brother, Lim Chong Eu, was a Chief Minister of Penang. After attending the prestigious Penang Free School, Lim Chong Keat studied architecture at the University of Manchester and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At university, he distinguished himself as a scholar and athlete. He was the first Asian to win the Commonwealth Fund (now Harkness) Fellowship and was a serious badminton player, and became captain of the University Badminton Club. While in the west, Lim was able to meet with leading architectural practitioners and thinkers of the day, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius and later Richard Buckminster Fuller. Notably, he nurtured a lifelong friendship with Fuller, and organised a series of Campuan meetings in Bali, later Penang, with intellectual exchanges with Fuller and others. The geodesic dome, so closely associated with Fuller, was also a recurring theme in Lim’s design interest.
MSA Building and Singapore Conference Hall, a historic view.
Lim returned to Malaya from his studies in 1958 and soon afterwards helped to establish Singapore’s first school of architecture at the Singapore Polytechnic. As a lecturer, he was noted for his progressive approach in imparting the spirit and rigour of the Bauhaus school of modern design, which he had absorbed from Gyorgy Kepes at MIT. Known for his charisma, sharp wit, and eloquence, he was a major influence on pioneer batches of architectural students, especially Tay Kheng Soon, who later became one of Singapore’s most famous architects. On retiring from practice in 1995, he returned to teaching when he was appointed visiting professor at the University of Manchester, and a Quatercentenary Visiting Fellow to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1997, the University of Manchester conferred on him an LL.D. (honoris causa).
The original DBS Building at Shenton Way, Singapore.
In 1960, Lim was instrumental in co-founding the Malayan Architects Co-partnership (MAC) with William Lim and Chen Voon Fee, with offices in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. The firm was hailed for its uncompromising modern design and deep sensitivity to local climate and context. From the start, the clarity of concept and attention to detail that Lim brought to the firm’s early residential projects were virtually unprecedented in Malaya. The firm made its breakthrough in 1961 when it won the design competition for the high-profile Singapore Conference Hall & Trade Union House project. Experts regard the design (renovated extensively since then) as among Singapore’s greatest works of modern architecture. Here, Lim and his team handled the modern design idiom with great confidence, producing poetic and dignified spaces. An important feature of the building was how it responded to the tropical climate, using generous sun shading, lofty spaces, and natural ventilation, while local culture was referenced via mosaic tile work that abstracted ethnic Malay motifs. These sensible and subtle gestures set a high benchmark and were a world away from the imported icons or overt symbolism of later “nationalist” architecture in the region.
Despite this success, personality differences amongst MAC partners led to a split in 1967, and Lim then founded Architects Team 3 (AT3), also known as Jurubena Bertiga as a successor firm, with partners Baharuddin Abu Kassim and Lim Chin See. AT3 won the competition for the Jurong Town Hall project with an innovative design, and shaped Singapore’s skyline in the 1970s with projects such as DBS Building (Southeast Asia’s tallest tower at the time) and UOB Building. The firm’s associates included Teoh Ong Tuck, Kok Siew Hoong and Raymond Woo. Indeed, it was among Singapore’s most successful architectural practices of that decade. Another milestone was the massive KOMTAR project in Penang, which was completed in 1986 after fifteen years of extensive urban analysis, planning, architectural design, and phased construction. This “city within a city” has been called “the last of the great national symbols of the 1970s”. The sixty-five-storey tower was Malaysia’s tallest building, although its impact proved controversial. In recognition of his body of work, Lim was awarded the prestigious PAM Gold Medal in 1997 from Pertubuhan Akitek Malaysia (Malaysian Institute of Architects).
With Bucky and friends at 1983 Campuan 4 Meeting at Bellevue, Penang.
Beyond his work as a designer, Lim was elected president of the Singapore Institute of Architects, and served as editor its architectural journal, Rumah and SIAJ. He was also appointed to sit on Singapore’s Housing & Development Board and the U.N. Panel for State & City Planning. For his contributions, he was awarded the Public Service Star (BBM) by the Singapore Government. Internationally, Lim was the founder chairman of ARCASIA (Architects Regional Council Asia) and also served as Chairman of Commonwealth Association of Architects Board of Education. He has promoted the arts in his various capacities — from featuring works by local artists in his architectural projects to encouraging the Alpha Gallery in Singapore, also serving on the boards of museums in Penang and K.L. He was an early heritage advocate in both Singapore and Penang, and is also known for his collection of historic prints, which he has lent for public exhibition and publication. Lim also has a deep appreciation for music, and is an amateur violin and viola player. Armed with specialist training in acoustics at MIT, he has a body of architectural works that include several of Singapore’s early performance venues. Lim was an early promoter of the world-renowned avant garde Singapore pianist, Margaret Leng Tan, and helped organise a concert and live recording album featuring her performance, and also for other Malaysian musicians.
With an abiding interest in ethnography and the Indigenous settlements of the region, Lim was Project Director for the Southeast Asia Cultural Research Programme (SEACURP) at ISEAS under a Toyota Foundation grant. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy Sciences Malaysia in 2012. In honour of his lifelong contribution to the architectural profession, Lim was awarded a Life Fellowship and also the SIA Gold Medal in 2015.
At Suriana Botanic Conservation Gardens in Penang.
Although he was widely seen as a renaissance man with a keen intellect and wide interests, few anticipated Lim’s reinvention in his late fifties as a botanical scholar, taxonomist, and conservationist. Around 1988, well before his retirement from professional practice in 1995, Lim began dedicating himself to botanical study. His special interest is in palms, gingers, and other Malaysian flora, especially rare or threatened native plants. In 2000, he initiated Folia malaysiana, a scholarly journal. It features accounts of new species from the region and is carried by global botanical institutes. Lim is personally responsible for accounts of more than twenty-six new species of palms, more than thirty-five species of gingers, and three new endemic genera: Kedhalia, Perakalia and Johoralia. He has also published in other botanical journals and presented papers at international botanical conferences. Lim also served as Chairman of the Malaysian Forestry Research & Development Board (FRIM) in 2001–04.
Apart from botanical research and publication work, Lim has established an ex situ conservation garden to study and propagate rare and endangered species, including as yet undescribed taxa. Suriana Botanic Conservation Gardens (Penang) has amassed a collection of native Malaysian plants that is probably unparalleled globally. As part of this project, Lim supports a group of workers from the indigenous Temiar community through a cooperative enterprise for their advancement, including traditional housing for them and their families. He divides his time between his family’s mansion on the outskirts of George Town, the Bellevue Hotel on Penang Hill (where he hosts occasional cultural and intellectual events), and the Suriana Gardens.
Last modified on 6 May 2024. Reproduced from Dinesh Naidu, “Lim Chong Keat”; in Leo Suryadinata, ed., Southeast Asian Personalities of Chinese Descent: A Biographical Dictionary, Volume I (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2012), 766-68, with the kind permission of the authors and publisher, ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute. All images are provided by Datuk Seri Lim Chong Keat.
References
Chen, Voon Fee (ed.). Encyclopedia of Malaysia Vol. 5: Architecture. Singapore: Archipelago Press, 1998.
Mohamad Tajuddin M. Rasdi and Nor Hayati Hussain. “National Identity and the Architecture of Malayan Architect Co-Partnership”. (accessed March 2012).
PAM Gold Medalist Lectures 2010. (accessed March 2012).
Powell, Robert. Line, Edge and Shade. Singapore: Page One Publishing Pte Ltd, 1997.
Seow, Eu Jin. “Architectural Development in Singapore”. Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1973.
