The Sane Thing To Do

Something’s happened to hard-nosed businessman and architect Ong Tze Boon, who now uses the L-word and talks about making the world a better place

- Judith Arellano Torres

The last time BluPrint interviewed Ong Tze Boon, president and CEO of Ong&Ong, he was just weeks into his three-year term as president of the Singapore Institute of Architects. Ebullient and blunt, he spoke of his plans for the organization—boosting membership numbers by 80%, injecting business talks and experiential visits into their Continuing Professional Development program, and getting architectural firms in Singapore to change the way they practice.

“The way we practice is over,” he told us in 2015. “When I say architecture has evolved, I don’t mean the profession has evolved. I don’t mean the buildings have evolved. It’s the service, the way we put things together that’s changed. This is something I’m telling all academics in the world. Every time I meet with the Dean of Architecture at the National University of Singapore, I keep saying, ‘you gotta get with the real world!’ We have been educating based on pillars—architecture, interiors, landscape, graphic design, brand identity. We go to four or five years of school—we graduate with a degree in one of the pillars. I’m telling everyone, customers don’t want that shit from us.”

The hyperbolic Ong would say things like, “We suck,” and called his SIA colleagues and the design industry in Singapore, “crazy.” When we interviewed him again in March of this year, he was on his last week as SIA president. Membership in the SIA hasn’t gone up by much, but he did introduce new content in the CPD program, and some firms seem to have taken pages from his playbook and adopted a 360-degree approach to problem-solving and design.