Ong Siew May (OSM) Professorship

We are pleased to welcome distinguished architects Ar Shin Egashira and Ar Rachaporn Choochuey, who will be joining us as the Ong Siew May (OSM) Distinguished Visiting Professors for Semester 2 of Academic Year 2026/27. They will contribute their expertise to Master of Architecture (MArch) Year 1 and 2 students in AR5802 Options Design Research Studio II and AR4101 Design 7, offering guidance and drawing on their extensive professional experience.

Shin Egashira (Ar)
While serving for many years as a Diploma Unit Master at the Architectural Association (AA) School in London, he also earned a PhD from the European Research Practice at RMIT University. His work has developed across architectural education and the practices of architecture, urbanism, and art.

I understand architecture not as a completed form, but as a process that continues to engage with place and human activity over time. My work focuses on the transformation of cities and landscapes, particularly the ambiguous conditions that emerge through processes of erosion, lapse, and transition.

From post-industrial and post-agricultural perspectives, I observe and document landscapes that have outlived their original functions, expressing them through architecture, objects, text, and installation. Through workshops and field research in different regions, I read cities and terminal landscapes as phenomena in states of attenuation and decline, attending to them with architectural care while exploring ways to re-articulate their latent contexts.

I look forward to joining the NUS Department of Architecture in the coming semester. Its distinctive academic character appears to emerge from the cultural context of the city, shaped by its multicultural composition. Its postcolonial histories are also deeply woven into the urban fabric.

Rachaporn Choochuey (Ar)
She is co-founder of all(zone), a Bangkok-based studio founded in 2009 and informed by the ever-changing conditions of tropical megacities, as well as the contemporary vernacular intelligence embedded in everyday life. Formerly a faculty member at the Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, she now lectures and teaches internationally, and has held visiting appointments at the Yale School of Architecture and Columbia GSAPP.

My research develops Practising Tropicality, Planetary Site as a framework for understanding architecture under planetary conditions shaped by uneven climate, extractive histories, and infrastructural volatility. Rather than treating “the tropical” as a geographic category or an aesthetic, I approach it as a set of operational questions—how architecture mediates heat, moisture, water, and exposure; how built form registers social and ecological unevenness; and how spatial practices adapt when stability is no longer assumed. Within this broader agenda, I study instability not as an exception but as a recurring condition that reveals the limits of universal standards of comfort, enclosure, and control.