Passive Lab House by RAD+ar is built on a land plot in a housing complex in Greater Jakarta. Surrounded by lush greenery, the corner house stands as a monolithic block with its rough concrete façade. Taking a closer look, the robust frontage opens to an inner part of the house exterior—a terrace with a swimming pool and glass-cladded balcony.

Blossom, an international Asian cuisine restaurant, is one of the many restaurants that sets foot in Marina Bay Sands Hotel, Singapore. As a 550-square-metre space, its footprint is rather miniscule compared to the vast and extensive lobby where it is located. Many restaurants in this case, whether in large hotel lobbies, shopping mall atria, food courts, or airports, are usually designed to be as open as possible. These restaurants are common to be only bounded by low partitions, which usually function to demarcate the dining space so that it does not interfere with the overall circulation.

Rumpun at Happi Village is an accommodation in Janda Baik, a natural gateway located one-hour-drive from Kuala Lumpur. Spread across a five-hectare land with lush forest and gardens, the accommodation hosts a dozen of guestrooms and several facilities. Instead of using the natural setting as a backdrop, the living spaces are nested in it and so the two become inseparable.

Situated in a dense neighbourhood in South Jakarta, H House stands on a corner land plot that measures only over 60 square metres. A plot with this size is tiny already, but the buildable area is even more limited as the city regulation requires setbacks from two sides of the land plot that are adjacent to the streets. As a result, H House can only utilise not more than 40 square metres of the land to erect the building.

Although terraced house often represents a mass production for dwellings, there are many ways design intervention could give this building typology a more personalised touch. Bewboc House by Fabian Tan Architect displays an interesting design intervention to a young family’s terraced house in Kuala Lumpur.

Recently, compact design has gained much popularity as a solution to a denser and more expensive space in cities around the world. In terms of functionality, compact design boasts its spatial flexibility—being able to cover multiple needs within one space. If most compact designs are usually applied for residential buildings, the recently finished Deloitte Center for the Edge (Asia Pacific) office in Singapore explores the possibilities of this design approach for a shared space.

In the recent years, adaptive reuse has become one of the most effective approaches in keeping unoccupied buildings with historic values from being demolished. By bringing new functions and purposes, aged buildings can gain new lives and at the same time offer shared memories and perspectives to the community. Generally, adaptive reuse principle is to leave a substantial portion of the historical significance intact while adding new elements to accommodate new purposes.

Of a few places one could safely retreat and relax in this pandemic time is one’s own abode. Many has since reconsidered and rethought their perspective of what an ideal home should be. Among many criteria of an ideal home expected by many homeowners today, having an inner garden or courtyard is on the top list. Completed in 2020, the Raffles House by eben is an ideal example of house with courtyards that promotes the dwellers’ well-being in this current situation.

In the recent years, e-commerce has been disrupting the operations of physical retail spaces, especially malls and department stores. But even if many people now prefer to shop through their handheld screens, the culture of hanging and dining out with others prevails. This makes way to new developments of retail spaces, such as a lifestyle mall that is smaller in size and provides more dining experience and entertainment. These smaller spaces that contain only more or less a dozen curated outlets have been gaining popularity and popped up in many cities.

Among the typical home office buildings in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur, the office of Mantab Group stands quite prominently thanks to its gleaming gold-coloured façade. Hovering over the second floor of the building, the metallic façade wraps the front-facing part of the building with its folded surface. Yet, in contrast with the grandiose façade, a modest and small timber finished box figure stands next to it, marking the entrance to the office.