The Oval partnership

The Oval partnership Our Multidisciplinary Team Transforms Cities and Creates Places You Want to Be.

There is a particular kind of café that feels familiar before you have ever been there – well-designed, considered and, ...
06/10/2026

There is a particular kind of café that feels familiar before you have ever been there – well-designed, considered and, in some hard-to-name way, nowhere in particular.

In our latest feature, we explore the growing homogenisation of café interiors – and what it suggests about the way social media is reshaping our relationship with place. Drawing on ideas from Rem Koolhaas, Marc Augé and Mark Fisher, the piece asks what happens when “third places” begin to function more like “non-places”: polished and welcoming, yet only loosely tied to the neighbourhoods around them.

It is a question that reaches beyond coffee shops. For those working in architecture and the built environment, the tension between visual legibility and genuine local identity sits close to the heart of what we do.

Read more: https://www.ovalpartnership.com/en/article/The-Standardised-Cafe-and-the-Loss-of-Place

As planners and architects, we’re used to quantifying the urban fabric and the lives of those within it. We’ve seen deca...
02/10/2026

As planners and architects, we’re used to quantifying the urban fabric and the lives of those within it.

We’ve seen decades of large-scale redevelopment across the region, driven by masterplans erase the existing urban fabric in the name of modernity.

This is not always a bad thing, but it has seen our cities become more homogenous. Can we develop while maintaining their character?

A few projects suggest we can: here, collaboration with residents prioritises their needs and preserves the soul of a neighbourhood while creating a more modern space. It preserves not only heritage, but character and vitality.

Read more at https://www.ovalpartnership.com/en/article/How-Cities-are-Keeping-Kampong-Spirit-Alive-And-What-We-Can-Learn

We were pleased to host the Singapore Land Authority - SLA during their recent visit to Shanghai, where we explored Shan...
30/09/2026

We were pleased to host the Singapore Land Authority - SLA during their recent visit to Shanghai, where we explored Shanghai DreamCenter, Zhangyuan, Columbia Circle Phase II and HKRI Taikoo Hui together.

Across these projects, the conversation centred on how placemaking and placekeeping can respond to very different urban environments while staying grounded in what makes each place distinct. From former industrial and heritage settings to complex mixed-use environments, each destination offers a reference point for how older buildings and existing sites can be rejuvenated, adapted and retrofitted without losing their character or identity.

What links them is a shared emphasis on public life: shaping settings that support connection, social exchange and meaningful experiences for people with varied needs and backgrounds.

For us, the visit was a valuable platform for dialogue, professional exchange and cross-city learning. We greatly appreciated SLA’s engagement and were pleased to hear that the visits were enriching and offered meaningful reference points for their future work.

In the rural Chinese village of Wencun, the rhythms of life continue much as they have for 400 years. Amid headlong deve...
28/09/2026

In the rural Chinese village of Wencun, the rhythms of life continue much as they have for 400 years. Amid headlong development across Asia, it looks like an anachronism.

Here, alleys lined by weathered stone walls trace lines through the village, courtyards open onto vegetable patches, bridges cross a creek that has tracked its path over centuries.

But this is no anachronism. It;s also not a museum or ‘theme village’. Rather, it’s the deliberate outcome of a project that brought villagers together with designers and authorities to repair and revitalise the urban fabric rather than tear it down.

We can learn a lot from Wencun — and other villages and urban enclaves across Asia — about heritage, preservation and what makes a place vital.

Read more at https://www.ovalpartnership.com/en/article/How-Cities-are-Keeping-Kampong-Spirit-Alive-And-What-We-Can-Learn

31/08/2026

How do we design for human connection in a rapidly expanding metropolis?

At Shenzhen Bay Cultural Plaza, we explored an alternative model for placemaking – one where architecture steps back to let landscape and public life lead.

Completed in 2025, the project re-stitches fragmented urban parcels into a connected cultural district, linking transit, the waterfront and public space through a layered realm. Using our Digital Placemaking methodology, the masterplan refined pedestrian flow across ground, elevated and below-ground levels, improving connectivity and making a complex site more legible and walkable.

From the sunken civic plaza to elevated green walkways and village-scaled streets, the project brings culture, commerce and community into closer relationship. Landscape plays a central role, moderating climate, supporting informal social life and creating a calmer rhythm within central Shenzhen.

The project has received Silver in the Public Architecture category at the latest Japan IDPA Award. The recognition speaks to the importance of data-driven, human-centred public realm design in shaping more connected urban districts.

Read more: https://www.ovalpartnership.com/en/project/Shenzhen-Bay-Cultural-Plaza

Day 3 of my CDMX Starter Guide is one for awe, inspiration and small details that pull me in.It begins at Casa Gilardi, ...
29/08/2026

Day 3 of my CDMX Starter Guide is one for awe, inspiration and small details that pull me in.

It begins at Casa Gilardi, Barragán’s last project, where saturated walls, water and shadow turn the house into cinematic frames. The pool in the dining room is one for the memory— though the smaller details – the yellow light-filledcorridor, a rooftop edge, an unbalustered staircase– do just as much work. From there, brunch at Comal Oculto, followed by Kurimanzutto, a welcome pocket of calm and space in the middle of the city.

Later, I stop at Chocolatería La Rifa for hot cocoa, then browse Korimi and Utilitario Mexicano for local pieces with character and humour. I end in Condesa with a walk along Amsterdam and tacos at Taquería Orinoco.

This is one of those days that feels balanced and spontaneous: strong visual moments, delicious food, thoughtful shops, and enough room in between to take in my last moments of Mexico City, leisurely.

Written by Wendy Tsai, Project Director at The Oval Partnership

Explore the 3-day CDMX Starter Guide: https://www.ovalpartnership.com/en/article/The-CDMX-Starter-Pack

Day 2 of my CDMX Starter Guide goes further into the city’s overlap of art, architecture and everyday life.This leg of t...
28/08/2026

Day 2 of my CDMX Starter Guide goes further into the city’s overlap of art, architecture and everyday life.

This leg of the itinerary moves between very different kinds of space: Bosco Sodi’s Casa Wabi Sabino, Barragán’s hypnotic La Cuadra San Cristóbal, the passing glimpse of Torres de Satélite, and the vertiginous interior of Biblioteca Vasconcelos. Along the way, there are smaller stops that stay with you too – a bakery hidden behind a doorbell, seafood in a busy market setting, and late drinks in a bar where the atmosphere is as considered as the menu.

What makes Mexico City so compelling is the way these experiences build on one another. I move from monumentality to texture, from colour and silence to crowd and flavour, and it all feels part of the same urban language.

More than a list of stops, the route becomes a way of reading the city through space, rhythm and use.

Written by Wendy Tsai, Project Director at The Oval Partnership

Explore the 3-day CDMX Starter Guide: https://www.ovalpartnership.com/en/article/The-CDMX-Starter-Pack

Mexico City is one of those places where architecture, food, craft and street life fold into one another. The city rewar...
26/08/2026

Mexico City is one of those places where architecture, food, craft and street life fold into one another. The city rewards close attention: to colour, texture, scale, and the way light lands on a wall or moves through the space.

In Day 1 of my CDMX Starter Guide, I begin in Roma Norte and move through a series of places that reveal different sides of the city. There’s Barragán’s 40 year experiment of extraordinary command of light, colour and atmosphere at Casa-Estudio; the sensory retail experience of local perfumery, Xinú; the vibrant graphic and cultural reads at Casa Bosques; the civic generosity of Chapultepec; and, later, tacos that fully justify the queue.

It’s a compact itinerary, but it captures how I connect with cities — through wandering, taking in the unfamiliar, eating like a local, and imagining the stories behind the architecture, the people, and their quiet everday rituals.

For architects, designers, urbanists and the design-curious, it’s an exciting place to be.

Written by Wendy Tsai , Project Director at The Oval Partnership

Explore the 3-day CDMX Starter Guide: https://www.ovalpartnership.com/en/article/The-CDMX-Starter-Pack

How can a place’s history be expressed through light and material? At Westlake 66, one answer lies in Silk Wave Symphon...
24/08/2026

How can a place’s history be expressed through light and material?

At Westlake 66, one answer lies in Silk Wave Symphony, a sculptural skylight installation shaped by West Lake, Hangzhou’s silk heritage and Baijingfang – “the place of a hundred wells” – a historic part of the city where wells once supported daily life and social exchange.

The installation is made from more than 60,000 suspended metal chains, arranged to form a rippling overhead surface that shifts with light and viewpoint. The chains gather into cascading folds, with a density and sheen that suggest both flowing water and lengths of silk suspended in air.

Layered tones of silver and nickel bronze add depth to the piece, recalling the textures of Hangzhou textiles and the richness of traditional dyes. Developed through parametric design and precision fabrication, the installation brings together craft and technology at a large scale.

Rather than illustrating local history directly, it draws on those references to create a ceiling feature that is specific to Hangzhou.

See more from the Westlake 66 project: https://www.ovalpartnership.com/en/project/Westlake-66

20/08/2026

How can urban regeneration carry a city forward without cutting it off from its past?

At Shanghai DreamCenter, we explored a people-first model of waterfront renewal that brings heritage, public life and contemporary culture into closer relationship.

On Shanghai’s West Bund, the masterplan we developed for the site’s central parcel and full waterfront reworks century-old industrial structures into a connected mixed-use district shaped by walkability, access and public life. Rather than demolish and rebuild, key cement factory buildings were retained and transformed for new cultural uses, reducing embodied carbon while preserving the site’s identity and extending its relevance for a new generation.

Terraces, promenades, elevated walkways and open spaces draw people through the site towards the Huangpu River, creating a layered public realm that supports both everyday use and larger civic and cultural activity.

Shanghai DreamCenter has received the Pioneer Award in the Public Architecture category at the latest Japan IDPA Award. It is encouraging to see this approach to adaptive reuse and connected urban design recognised.

Read more: https://www.ovalpartnership.com/en/project/Shanghai-DreamCenter

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