Richard Hassell is an Australian-born architect and artist who has lived in Singapore since 1989. He founded the architectural practice WOHA with Wong Mun Summ in 1989. WOHA has exhibited their work in the Venice Biennale, most recently with a video installation entitled “Fragments of an Urban Future” and in New York at the Skyscraper Museum with “Garden City| Mega City” both in 2016. WOHA have received 7 President’s Design Awards, Singapore’s highest design accolade.
Richard’s art practice intersects with the architectural practice, and explores complex geometries and tiling. Growing up with his brother, mathematician Professor Andrew Hassell of the Analysis and Geometry Program at the National University of Australia, recreational mathematics including the art of M.C. Escher was an early source of delight and wonder. Since 2004 Richard has extended M.C.Escher’s work on tessellations and symmetry into new geometries discovered after Escher’s death. These complex geometries have also been incorporated into the designs of WOHA’s buildings, such as the aperiodic facades in the Sanya Intercontinental Hotel on Hainan Island and the cladding on the Chengdu Tianfu complex in China.
Recently WOHA exhibited a pavilion with a fractal plane-filling façade in Paris and Singapore, with a cladding system titled the Beanstalk.
His book, “Strange Creatures” is a series of prints, artworks and wall panels, and includes tessellations based on fractals, aperiodic tiling and plane-filling curves. The designs reference not only Escher and recent science, but also traditional art of the region, including South East Asian textiles and tribal art.
Learn more at: https://richardhassell.net/
