In the noise of today’s architectural production, something fundamental is often lost:
Not what buildings look like, but what they mean.
Not how they perform, but how they remember.
Core Design Workshop is a Malaysian architectural practice founded on the belief that architecture should live in tension, not in resolution. We work in the space between:
Old and new.
Seen and unseen.
Form and feeling.
Our design approach begins with what is already there, existing structures, memories, contradictions, and inserts new interventions alongside rather than over them. This produces not harmony, but friction. Not nostalgia, but dialogue.
We are not interested in style. We are drawn to continuity, infiltration, and quiet monumentality. Our buildings do not shout. But they insist on presence. A bookcase as a wall. A courtyard as a memory. A pitched concrete roof as a question mark.
As Malaysians with Chinese diasporic background, we do not replicate typologies. We build cultural relevance not through mimicry, but through spatial resonance. Our architecture is local without being folkloric. Global without being generic.
In every project, we ask:
Can space carry the trace of transition?
Can materials speak of memory, not just structure?
Can architecture be a site of both comfort and resistance?
We believe it can.
And we build toward that belief, one tension at a time.