City & Country: Raising their game

There aren’t many women architects because women are expected to juggle career and family, says Lillian Tay, newly elected deputy president of the Malaysian Institute of Architects (PAM).

That said, she has forged ahead in her chosen career. Tay obtained her Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Architecture degrees from Princeton University in the US. She then worked at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates in New York City for three years before  returning to Kuala Lumpur in 1991. Her decision to return home was simple: she saw the opportunities Malaysia had to offer.

Now principal and director of Veritas Design Group, she tells City & Country that one challenge facing Malaysian architects is that high-profile projects tend to go to foreign architects despite their merits being equal. She believes there is no reason why they cannot be handled by Malaysian architects. However, she acknowledges the lack of architects in Malaysia, which she describes as a chicken-and-egg situation” because of the lack of interesting projects for them.

Tay intends to use her tenure at PAM to raise the profile of Malaysian architects to enable them to compete for jobs at international level.

“We are looking at building capacity so that our architects will be able to compete as the market opens up. The next step is to be able to offer services regionally and maybe even as far as the UK,” she says.

Read the full report in the June 20 issue of City & Country, the property pullout of The Edge Malaysia business weekly. Subscribe here for your personal copy.