Atleier Ten's Woon To Watch

With pioneering works around the region, design consultancy Atelier Ten is at the forefront of sustainable building in Asia. Henry Woon, the Singapore director of the firm, talks about what has gone before and what lies ahead.

- Jonathan Evans

If you’ve not heard of Henry Woon, or the company he helms, you have most definitely visited one of the buildings he helped create. After studying in Hong Kong and London, Woon worked as an engineer in London for 12 years, including a three-year stint at WSP Buildings, where his work with Foster+Partners on Masdar City—an ultramodern desert development in Abu Dhabi—served as “a real eyeopener.”

The last eight years have seen Woon collaborate with some of the world’s most noted architects for Atelier Ten, which not only brought extraordinary architecture to cityscapes around the world but has placed innovative environmental and sustainable credentials at the heart of its practice.

Garnering enormous acclaim for the firm has been Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay (2012), which Woon declares is Atelier Ten’s “signature project” and “benchmark” for its future work.

Much of Woon’s own work has taken him further from Southeast Asia. His engineering expertise led to the rise of such projects as Meixi Lake Exhibition Centre in Changsha, south-central China— an “exemplary sustainable building in the region to showcase sustainable building technologies,” he says—and Bee’ah Headquarters, an ultra-low-carbon construction in the Arabic city of Sharjah that features the inimitable architectural flair of the late Zaha Hadid.

Woon’s most recent posting, the Jewel at Singapore’s Changi airport, has the potential to become the most renowned Atelier Ten project to date. Fervently anticipated since news of its construction started circulating six years ago, the Jewel finally opened on 17 April. The steel-and-glass masterwork—dreamed up by an eclectic design team under Marina Bay Sands maestro Moshe Safdie—contains, among many attractions, a 130-room hotel and the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, the Rain Vortex.