4 of Asia’s best-known architectural photographers share their favourite shots

David Yeow has a masters in architecture and is passionate about documenting spaces and how people use them; he cites Tadao Ando as an architect whose work he admires, as he loves how light and shadow play across Ando’s concrete projects. It is perhaps natural that he photographed the PAM Centre (right) in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur—headquarters of Pertubuhan Akitek Malaysia, the Malaysia Institute of Architects—with its industrial feel, black aluminium screen façade, concrete slabs, exposed pipes, raw brick walls and steel staircases.

Yeow shot the building in the evening. “I took a few different photos as the sunlight crept across the facade, but it was this shot, taken just past 7pm when the sunlight was starting to diffuse, that I selected as the final image. The angled sun [lit up] the interiors and the stepped terrace trees. I like this kind of architecture; it’s not overly complicated, while maintaining a subtle beauty.”

The Kaohsiung Music Center was designed to symbolise the seaport status of Kaohsiung and integrate into the surrounding harbour; it looks a little like a whale swimming in the sea. Designed by Spanish architect Manuel Monteserín and completed in 2021, the complex’s surfaces are covered by tessalated hexagons which create a sense of movement and give the impression from above of a massive coral reef.

These two photos are taken from a series of works by Taiwanese photographer Yi-Hsien Lee, which won the 2022 Architecture Photography MasterPrize Exterior Photography of the Year Award.

“Capturing change is the cure for nostalgia,” says photographer Benny Loh. Living in Singapore, where rapid change is the only constant, “focusing on the present makes me admire the steps taken to move ahead”. Through his images, Loh “captures subjects on the precipice of change—the moment when it tips over to be something else”.

Case in point: this image of the State Courts towers in Chinatown, an extension to the original octagonal State Courts building (partially seen in the middle ground) built in 1975, which achieved conservation status in 2013. The extension shows “the progress and development in Singapore, with a much bigger scale than the original. Having the terracotta-clad courtrooms stacked up also pays homage to the roof tiles of the shophouses nearby.”

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