rebuilding communities

Shift2024, the much-anticipated conference returns with a stellar line-up of prolific architects making their mark in Asian urban design.

- Nizar Musa

Organised by DOMA Initiatives, the two-day September 2024 event in Kuala Lumpur marked the conference’s fourth edition. Its theme, Rebuilding Communities, brought award-winning speakers from across the globe, including two recipients of the 2022 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, who presented their ideas and projects in a highly engaging and entertaining 360-degree format.

In the area of Asian urban design, practices from Taiwan, South Korea and Indonesia showcased distinctive designs for the metropolitan environment. d+a catches up with these three exciting firms to talk about their recent works, and what they have in store for 2025 and beyond.

medium of interaction

Started in 2020, AxB Architecture Studio is an extension of Jay Chiu Architects & Associates that seeks to redefine Taiwanese identity in the island’s architectural landscape. The relationship between two differing components or programmes – what AxB founder Jay describes as direct-indirect mutualism – forms the ethos driving the studio’s forays into the brave and the unconventional.

Beginning with an experimental low-rise, the studio scaled their idea of architecture as a medium of interaction – to the recently completed Keelung Tower situated in northeastern Taiwan. “It’s a beautiful city that’s been overdeveloped in the last 40 years. You’ll see a lot of things going on – postmodern stuff.

It’s actually quite chaotic,” remarks Jay of Keelung’s kaleidoscopic cityscape. “So for this (urban renewal) project, the city government and I decided to do something bold. So we thought, why not just move the crane from the harbour to our site and reconstruct it there? The concept really comes from that.”