Tay Kheng Soon was born in Singapore on 8 December 1940. He was in the first architecture diploma class at Singapore Polytechnic in 1958. With William Lim and Koh Seow Chuan he formed Design Partnership in 1967. That office is remembered for People’s Park Complex and Golden Mile Complex: mixed-use buildings that treated the tropical street as a room, not a corridor of glass. He left in 1974 and founded Akitek Tenggara in 1976. He was president of the Singapore Institute of Architects from 1990 to 1993, a founder of the Singapore Planning and Urban Research Group, and later an adjunct professor at the National University of Singapore. He wrote Mega-cities in the Tropics (1989) and has kept arguing, in print and in interviews, against the idea of a “global city” that forgets climate and countryside.
Since about 2005 the word he uses for that argument is Rubanisation: rural and urban as one space. In a 2008 essay for Global Asia he asked Asian cities to behold the countryside. The published picture is walkable settlements among farms, not another hyper-dense core that empties the villages. He had already practised a version of that thought in northeast Thailand with Mechai Viravaidya’s Population and Community Development Association: a school and community centre at Lamplaimat, rammed earth and bamboo, cheaper than industrial kit. That is tropical planning with a paper trail. It is not Mu Aye Pu.
During the ceasefire years, drawings for this riverside named him visionary architect and masterplanner of Mu Aye Pu, and said he visited Mae Sot in April 2016. A later statement in 2020 claimed master-planning work by him. Tay has not, in public, confirmed those drawings as his own. A modest guesthouse sketch from the same years credits a Mae Sot studio, Estudio Cavernas, not Tay. Two ideas sat beside each other. They are not the same. The houses on the bank are still timber and bamboo.
The village is not a drawing. The ceasefire-year stills are in a gallery of free city drawings produced for Mu Aye Pu Development Corporation. They remained paper. See History, vernacular building, and people of this place.