Kay Ngee Tan graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in 1984, then went on to win the RIBA Students Competition in 1985 and the London Royal Academy Young Designer Award in 1987. He established Kay Ngee Tan Architects first in London in 1990, and subsequently in Singapore. In 2000, he won (together with ECA of London) the competition to design and build the Singapore Management University.

Mr. Tan has worked on projects around the world. He designed one of the 12 villas at the Commune by the Great Wall outside of Beijing and received the Venice Biennale Silver Award in 2002. In 2006, he won the Japan Design Award and the CS Design Award for the Kinokuniya bookstore in Sapporo.

In 2007, he received the President’s Design Award for the Page One Bookshop at Vivocity, Singapore. His ongoing and completed projects include: the Singapore Pavilion at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, villas in the outskirts of Hangzhou, a boutique hotel in the Malay cultural area of Singapore, the headquarters for Bread Talk, apartment buildings in Taipei, and the Buddhist Cultural Museum in Singapore.

His published work includes: Never Ending Summer in 1978, Strawberry Fields Revisited in 2006 and Magnetic Fields of Cities, which was chosen by Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Week) as one of the Ten Best (nonfiction) Books of the Year in 2008.