Meeting with the Green Urban Planner: A Conversation Between Ken Yeang and Steffen Lehmann on Eco-Masterplanning for Green Cities

Malaysian architect Dr. Ken Yeang is an architect-planner and is frequently described as one of the foremost eco-designers, theoreticians, and thinkers in the field of green design. He has been described as one of the world's leading advocates in ecological and passive low-energy design. He has designed over one hundred projects, and his theory of “bio-climatic” towers has had an impact around the world, fusing high-tech with organic principles. He was born in Penang, Malaysia, in 1948, and was educated in Penang, the United States, and at the Architectural Association in London. He received his doctorate in Architecture from Cambridge University in 1974. He is the author of a number of books on the topic of ecological planning and high-rise design (e.g., The Skyscraper: Bio-climatically Considered, 1996; Eco-Masterplanning, 2009). According to Yeang, the “bioclimatic” high-rise tower is a low-energy tower that is based on bioclimatic design principles and designed as a vertical urban design typo...