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  3. Chua Zi Jun, Director

Director Chua Zi Jun

Photo of Chua Zi Jun
Knowing that my two young children may live and engage in the buildings I build today, drives me to do my best for them and their generation.

Chua Zi Jun, better known as Ziggy, is a director at DP Architects.

Ziggy specialises in retail and mixed-use developments. Working on The Dubai Mall, one of the world’s largest malls, in the early years of his career ignited his passion and curiosity towards the retail landscape of the future. Ziggy was handpicked to participate in the Sentosa Integrated Resort competition where he worked closely with Michael Graves and Associates. Ziggy was entrusted with the role of project architect for one of the Sentosa IR hotels, a development with extremely challenging timeline and high complexity.

Outside of Singapore, Ziggy puts his focus on developing Asian markets such as India, IndoChina and China. He is passionate about urban economics and the impact of urbanisation in developing cities. In his opinion, although architecture and real estate has been incentivised by commercial demands, the built environment can still be positively shaped once the parameters are well identified.

As a firm proponent of retail-integrated mixed-use developments and co-head of DPA’s retail typology research group, Ziggy has designed a number of mixed-use proposals in Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, China and India. He has been invited to Mumbai as a keynote speaker on several occasions to share his insights on the paradigm shift in retail architecture. Effectively bilingual, Ziggy has also leveraged his valuable experience to deepen DPA’s foothold in the IndoChina market through Chinese investments.

One of DP’s younger directors, Ziggy has been earmarked as part of the practice’s next generation of leadership to redefine the practice for tomorrow.  He was appointed Tech Pillar Lead for DP’s strategic Green-Well-Tech (GWT) thrust to reinforce the practice’s integrative design delivery. Ziggy believes that design technology has the power to widen the possibilities of our practice and to streamline processes. His role as Pillar Lead is to build DP's knowledge base and leadership in the design technology domain, so as to strengthen the fundamentals of design and delivery.