Born in Penang, educated at Penang Free School, University of Malaya, University of Manchecter and MIT. RIBA Rome Scholarship Finallist 1956, Commonwealth Fund (Harkness) Fellow 1955-56, Visiting Professor University of Manchester 1995-2004, Quatercentenary Visiting Fellow Emmanuel College Cambridge 1995, PAM Gold Medalist 1997. .

Apart from his well-known involvement with SIA, Singapore Polytechnic School of Building & Architecture, CAA, Arcasia, HDB (and less known, with the UNDP Panel for State & City Planning, Singapore) and practice under Malayan Architect’s Co-partnership and Architects Team Three, he has had strong interests in Ethnography and the Indigenous Habitat of S.E. Asia, as Project Director for the S.E.Asia Cultural Research Programme (SEACURP) at ISEAS under a Toyota Foundation grant. He will recount his personal contacts with significant international personalities, and global experiences. He has served a Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester (1995-2004), and as the Quatercentenary Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1995). He retired from active practice in 1995, and has served advisorily in education and urban planning. He has served as Chairman of the Malaysian Forestry Research & Development Board, FRIM (2001-2004), and has been dedicating himself to botanical research, inter alia, and currently in the publishing of the journal Folia malaysiana, and with the Suriana Botanic Conservation Gardens in Penang. He was recently elected a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia.