About Mace Studio

Mace Studio is a Landscape Architectural practice  based in the cosmopolitan city of Singapore. Living in this highly successful and urbanised environment, set admist the iconic tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia inspires our attitudes and recipes in our creations. The traditional practice of landscape architecture is all about building a harmonious balance between nature's rich ecology and man's complex fabric of development through research, planning and design. It remains as our ultimate goal in addressing the current global issues of enhancing sustainability, reducing energy consumption and mitigating climate changes with very good design. Our studio's mandate and responsibility, in the current environmental era, is to advance this balance to a higher level of sophistication. We therefore, seek to sculpt the dynamic living mantle into sustainable and quality  Fusion Landscapes, a vision for the architecture of the land , which together exudes meaningful artistry, interactive relationships and dimensional connections. We can successfully achieve this vision through using compositions of Environmental Creatives made up of five inter-connected layers:  Spirit, Energy, Micro-climate, Ecology and Dreams. 01. SPIRIT  - Every place has a story to tell about its embedded past, active present and symbolic future. This is its natural and cultural value, a spiritual value, attached to a human settlement or community. Nature's footprint is preserved in the glacial change of the underlying geology which in turn shapes the response of the visual landscape to its environment. A cultural footprint is shaped by lifestyle patterns in human settlements, significant events of local, regional or national dimensions and the emotional attachment to a place. However, values may change as their environment is modified over time due to natural processes, natural disasters, events, cultural changes and fading of memories. 02. ENERGY  - Places are composed of a jigsaw of spaces. Spaces are formed from various 3 dimensional volumetric shapes and sizes. There are positive spaces - purposeful and deliberate volumes and there are negative spaces - left over and ill-defined volumes. They also have a hierarchical structure based on intensity of use and values of importance. Combining the appropriate spatial and volumetric combinations causes a flow of energy levels from and between spaces, creating a vibrant drama unique to each place. 03. MICRO-CLIMATE  - It is important that both nature and man are happy and comfortable in their living environments. The micro-climatic conditions of each and every space must be well considered to enable a design to "live". If not, even a well conceived design will "die". Important design sets to consider include: sun and shade density through a day and seasonal variability; requirements for different soil types, moisture and water demand and corresponding drainage methods; wind, evaporation and desiccation effects; plant habits, growth rates and maintenance regimes; circulation and ergonomic suitability; temperature variability and ambient comfort; and appropraite colours with suitable materials. 04. ECOLOGY  - Ecology is about providing appropriate underlying systems to drive sustainability in the built landscape. This reduces use of construciton materials, wastage, building and associated costs and encourages recycling. This ecology of systems is a hybrid of nature and technology working in tandem to function effectively and efficiently within any urban environment. It involves interaction between the Green Web - the living mantle of people and greenery, and the Ground Web - the terrain, soils and drainage system. This is scalable from individual developments to the size of cities. 05. DREAMS  - Landscape architecture has from the onset been a duality of science and art. This integration needs to come to the fore where landscapes are treated as an art form, and not as decorative functional entities. Beautiful integrated solutions between the sciences - physics, chemistry, geography and geology, and man's creativeness - experimentation, fantasies and talent, can bring us to the next level of appreciation and understanding of landscapes. Design needs to be responsible, but should not be restrained. We must dream.