Ten years ago when I visited landscape architect and sculptor Colin K Okashimo’s office at Beach Road, the space was filled with staff members, work-in-progress models and marquettes. Last month, when I walked into his current office in a warehouse building along Syed Alwi Road, it was still chock-a-block with models and marquettes, but the difference was that there were only five people in the team, including Okashimo.
“I’m doing less work in general. I make a conscious effort not to take projects just for the sake of it. But maybe now we are too quiet,” jested Okashimo. Taking on fewer projects does not mean doing less work. Rather, it allows the firm more time to think through and develop each project, resulting in better outcomes.
Tall, bespectacled and always dressed in black, Okashimo, who is of Japanese descent, was born in Toronto, Canada in 1958. After graduating with a landscape architecture degree from the University of Guelph in 1982, he headed to Honolulu to work for Belt Collins, a landscape, engineering and master planning firm. That year, at the age of 24, the firm sent him to the Singapore office, where he rose to become regional managing director just three years later. In 1996, he started Okashimo Pte Ltd.
A string of accolades defines the firm’s 28-year oeuvre. Early projects like Belle Mare Plage resort and Ephelia resort in the Seychelles were prodigious of Okashimo’s adeptness in creating impactful work. Following these, he also crafted manifold contemplative landscapes marked with evocative sculptures cast from bronze, stone and glass in hospitality projects like The Ritz-Carlton, Nikko in Japan and Pullman Mandalay Mingalar. Several private residences and high-end condominiums in Singapore and Malaysia also bear his imprint.