OMA Asia Ltd. (CHINA) Aaron TAN Hee Hung (1963)
Singapore-born Aaron Tan went into exile in the 1990s in the United States, where he attended Rem Koolhaas's classes at the Harvard GSD. He then took part in his research projects involving the Pearl River Delta region, and wrote a thesis on the city of Kowloon, a fortified Chinese enclave in Hong Kong--akin to an Asian West Berlin (cf. Cities on the Move, Bordeaux, 1998). In Hong Kong, in 1994, together with Rem Koolhaas, he founded O.M.A. Asia, an Asian branch of the Rotterdam agency, in an attempt to become involved in the extraordinary urban vitality of that region. And it is indeed this vitalist concept that informs O.M.A. Asia projects. In order to plan and act both openly and dynamically in relation to these fast-moving and anarchic urban phenomena, O.M.A. Asia takes its concepts and model from bio-technology and recent theories to do with artificial intelligence. To develop the industrial wasteland of the Jurong Town Corporation in Singapore (JTC/Vista, 2000), for example, their strategy is based on an analysis and "cellular", monadic organization of space, helping to link complexity, flexibility and evolutiveness.