1. Whisky

One of the most memorable moments in the late 1990’s, after a day’s session at the AIA Convention in Chicago were the five of us, sitting in a darkened bar: Mike Sorkin, Suha Ozkan (Aga Khan Awards), Kenneth Frampton. David Teh and myself, drinking ourselves silly. For some reason, whisky was the liquor of the day. I was ordering round after rounds for everyone, until finally Ken got up and stormed off muttering, ‘You Malaysians are crazies!’

2. Kisho Kurokawa

Around 1972, I was a PhD student at Cambridge (UK) and received a phone call from Charles Jencks. He said, ‘Come down for tea as we are hosting Kisho Kurokawa.’ So I drove down to Charles’s house (near Holland Park), where he was living with Maggie Keswick. Maggie was studying at the AA at the same year as my brother. She was from the Keswick family which owns Jardines.

After tea, Charles said why don’t you take a short detour and drive Mr Kurokawa to Heathrow, as he is flying back to Tokyo? So there I was, driving my tinny and rattling red FIAT 127 (bought from another student) and drove to Heathrow.

In the car, for conversation. Kurokawa says, ‘You know Ken, I have a theory that I can tell a person’s architecture by looking at their face.’

Could be, I say.

He continues, ‘Look at Philip Johnson. He has a sophisticated face, and he does very sophisticated looking buildings.’

Maybe, I say.

‘And how about this,’ he continues ‘Look at Paul Rudolf. He has a crew-cut hair style, very chunky facial features, and he does all these off-form concrete buildings.’

A little bit better, I say.

Finally, he says ‘Look at Buckminster Fuller: he is bald . . . and he does all these domes!’

3. I M Pei

In 2010, I M. Pei was given the RIBA Gold Medal. I had met him a few weeks earlier at his birthday party at NYC. Having heard he was going to get the Gold in London, I organised a lunch for him at Princess Garden, a Chinese restaurant on North Audley Street that links Grosvenor Square with Oxford Street. Others at lunch included Peter Murray and Paul Hyett.

I asked Pei if he was Shanghainese, as his father used to be manager of the Hong Kong Bank at Shanghai, and he had also designed the Bank of China at Hong Kong. No, he said, he was actually Cantonese from Su Chow, where he still had a house.

After lunch we walked down to have a look at the US Embassy designed by Eero Saarinen as he was then doing the competition for a new US Embassy south of the river.

Invariably, our conversation went to architecture, and he asked, ‘Ken, what sort of architecture do you do?’ I replied, ‘I do green architecture’, but his generation never understood what green architecture was, so he asked, ‘Ken, what is green architecture?’

I wondered how to reply him, as my lecture to explain green architecture is 40 minutes long. So out of expediency, I just replied, ‘Mr Pei, it’s three coats of green paint.’ He nodded and seemed satisfied with the answer . . .

4. Norman Foster

I was chatting about hotels with Norman (now Lord) Foster and I said my three all-time favourites are the Adlon in Berlin (near the Brandenberg Gate), the Peninsula (in Hong Kong) and the Beverley Wiltshire (where ‘Pretty Woman’ was filmed with actors, Richard Gere and Julia Roberts). I love the Beverly Wilshire, as it is the only hotel where the elevator cabin has a seating bench at its rear wall for the weary traveller.

Norman said he had an experience with the laundry service at the Peninsula where on one occasion when staying there, he was wearing a white Ralph Lauren shirt with a black polo player logo. He sent the shirt to the laundry and it came back with a huge hole where the logo had been, with a note attached: ‘Lord Foster, we are very sorry we could not get rid of the stain’.

The hotel’s laundry department thought the black polo player logo was a stain and scrubbed the shirt until they made a big hole.

5. Frank Gehry

I met Frank Gehry on a few occasions before he passed away last December. He was friendly and gentle, but with a tough resilient personality,

I first met him back in 1972 or 73 in Los Angeles, before he became famous. I visited his studio at Santa Monica and was shown a small room with pieces of Formica strewn all over the floor. He was working on a fish-shaped lamp using solid colour-core Formica. His design theme then was ‘fish’. I was later shown his design for an advertising company (Chiat Day) where he had three-storey giant binoculars in front.

I did not meet him again until about 15 years later at the coffee house of a hotel in Kensington, London. He was in a pissed-off mood, mad like hell that Norman Foster did a masterplan scheme in competition for the huge King’s Cross site and took the project away from a US consortium including him. It was late in the evening. It was clear he was in a foul mood. He had a piece of Danish pastry in front of him, and he was unconsciously stabbing it. I thought he was probably wishing the pastry was Norman Foster!

6. Cesar Pelli

Cesar Pelli is the architect for the massive KLCC Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur and was Dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1977 to 1984.

On one occasion as Dean, Pelli walked into a room displaying student schemes and pointed at each work saying, ‘Cows, cows, cows, all cows.’ The students were mystified – ‘why ‘cows’? Pelli is actually South American, and sometimes spoke with a Spanish pronunciation. What he really meant was not ‘cows’ but ‘chaos’.

Cinemas in the US have continuous repeated showings of the same movies, with a second one in-between as the B-movie filler with lesser-known actors. As an architect, Pelli felt he never quite got the same celebrated acclaim that his contemporaries received.

The critic Charle Jencks said that Pelli once ruefully remarked that he felt like a ‘B-movie’ actor.

7. Richard Rogers

I was on a train back to London from Chatham, and sitting opposite me was Sir Terry Farrell. Our conversation eventually turned to his contemporaries. He said he liked Norman (Foster), but disliked Richard (Rogers). I asked why?

He replied, ‘Richard was always stealing my projects’. I asked what he meant. He said he did a lot of urban design work but after his urban design plans were approved, Richard Rogers would walk off with the architecture.

Soon after that meeting, I was asked by the American project manager for our National Library Singapore to arrange a study tour of UK architects offices to see how they worked.

Eventually, he ended up at Richard Rogers’ office. Richard asked him why he was visiting UK architect offices. The PM said his client and team were working on the National Library project, with me as the architect, and they had asked me to arrange the study tour.

Richard then said: ‘Why are you using Ken Yeang? You should be using me!’

8. Tay Kheng Soon

The Singapore Architect Tay Kheng Soon (TKS) is one of the smartest architects around.

On one occasion we were both on the same flight from Beijing to Singapore but had a forced lay-over in Hong Kong, while aircraft repairs were carried out. There we were, both sitting together in the business class lounge. My thinking was here’s an opportunity to have a conversation about architecture.

His response was an outright refusal. ‘There’s no point, as you and I will never agree.’ I said we hadn’t even started, but he repeated. ‘You and I will never agree.’

Not to be deterred, I tried again. I referred to an important piece of writing by a famous critic, and asked what he thought of the piece. His reply was simply: ‘There’s nothing there.’ Thinking he misunderstood my question, I tried again and explained what I thought the piece meant. He repeated that there was nothing there, and told me to ‘read between the lines’.

When someone tells me to read between the lines’ it usually means that I have missed the point, and that there is another explanation or interpretation that I hadn’t noticed. I asked what he meant by ‘reading between the lines’, and ‘there is nothing there’. He explained. ‘Just look at the printed lines in the page . . . between the printed lines is nothing but just white space.’

9. Robert Stern

Bob Stern (1939-2025) was a good friend. He invited me to lecture at Yale in the early 200’s when he was Dean (1998-2016). He had a dominant personality and would sit in the centre seat of the front row and shout out (friendly) comments as I was lecturing. I later visited his small apartment at Connecticut.

I first met him at the Jerusalem Seminar in Israel, a major conference convened by Charles Jencks. Speakers were the good and the great of the architectural world: Peter Cook, Zaha Hadid. Thom Maine, Jean Nouvel, Wolf Prix and others.

From all the speakers Bob was the odd man out, being a dyed-in-the wool Post-Modernist, an architectural style that did not align well with the others. His lecture did not receive the same applause as the others.

After the presentations, I saw him in the hotel lobby walking listlessly and I asked him if everything was all right. He said, ‘I am pissed off,’ adding ‘I think I am just going to go to my room, and sulk . . .’

10. Bangladesh

In the mid-1980s I was sent by the Aga Khan Awards to Dhaka to write a report on the massive Parliament building designed by Louis Kahn. At that time Bangladesh was one of the poorest countries in the world, before it became today the ‘clothing manufacturing workshop’ for the world’s fashion industry.

As I was walking out of my hotel room to head for the airport. I got a phone call from three students. At the door of the Sheraton at Dhaka, they presented me with a large manifesto (A3 size) on an architecture for Bangladesh, written by the Chetana group under Masrul Islam. The manifesto was printed in brown ink on brown wrapping paper. Can you imagine? Here is then one of the poorest countries in the world (then), yet its young leading architects are able to get their act together to write a manifesto on nationalist architecture and even had it printed. It makes many architects elsewhere look like laggards.

Fast forward 20 years: I am sitting at a coffee table outside the bookshop at the AIA Convention in New Orleans, and a gentleman comes up and asks ‘Are you Ken Yeang?’ It was Farooq Ameen, one of the students I met back in Dhaka, now a qualified architect practising in San Francisco.

11. Ron Lewcock

I met Ron Lewcock (1929-2022) in 1972, when he was a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. We had tea at his college several times, being just a short walk from my room off Grange Road. Ron was a Professor at MIT, a scholar and expert on Sri Lankan and Islamic architecture.

In the early 90s he visited my office. He saw me reviewing my architects’ work, going from desk to desk, explaining what was needed to make the design greener (enhanced biodiversity etc). Ron would hear me say several times to my staff, ‘It’s not green enough, let’s make it greener’.

Ron later said that when he was at Robert Venturi’s office, the dyed-in-the-wool Post-Modernist would make exclamations, not unlike mine. He would say, ‘It’s not ugly enough, make it uglier!’ I wasn’t sure if Ron was joking.

12. Kisho Kurokawa (again!)

Kisho Kurokawa related that after giving a lecture in Africa, his African host gave him twin leopard cubs as a present. KK said he could not take them back to Japan, but his African host asked him to give them names anyway.

He called one, ‘Kuro’, and the other ‘Kawa’.

13. Alvin and Zaha

Zaha Hadid (1950-2016) studied and later taught at the AA School (1977-1987), long before she became wildly famous and won the Pritzker Prize. The head of the AA then was Alvin Boyarsky, for whom I did freelance graphic work when he was running the International Institute of Design in 1969, just before he became head of the AA School.

Alvin had immense respect for Zaha, whom he referred as ‘Madame’; his office was on the top floor of 34 Bedford Square, right next to Zaha’s teaching studio.

On one occasion when I was chatting with Alvin in his office, we could hear Zaha blasting through the walls at the top of her voice. She was known for her unrestrained colourful language and on that day we could hear her shouting ‘f…k this!’, ‘f…k that!’ etc.

‘Oh dear,’ I said to Alvin, ‘it seems Madame is angry.’ Alvin replied, ‘No, that’s normal. She is just teaching..”.

14. Cambridge

Alison (1928-1993) and Peter Smithson (1923-2003) were responsible for the New Brutalism movement and the urban theory of the TEAM 10, a group of architects which assembled in July 1953 at the 9th meeting of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM). The group created a schism within CIAM by challenging its doctrinaire approach to urbanism.

Around the early 70s, the first head of the Cambridge University School of Architecture, Sir Leslie Martin, retired. The search went out for a new professor.

When Peter Smithson’s name was mooted, one of the senior lecturers (I believe it was Alex Pike) said: ‘Wait a minute, the professorship is a chair, not a settee!’