British architect Will Alsop is responsible for such striking buildings as Le Grand Bleu in Marseilles, the Ferry Terminal in Hamburg and the Stirling Prize-winning Peckham Library in South London. Alsop regards Le Corbusier, Sir John Soane, Mies van der Rohe and John Vanbrugh as his architectural heroes. His avant-garde, Modernist buildings are usually distinguished by bright colour and unusual forms.

Upon obtaining his Master’s degree from Harvard in 1984, landscape architect and founder of Bensley Design Studio Bill Bensley began his career in Asia with Belt Collins & Associates in Singapore, where he supervised numerous landscape projects throughout the region, eventually taking the post of managing director of their Hong Kong office in 1987. He launched Bensley Design Studio in 1989 and counts brands such as Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental and Grand Hyatt among his clients.

Bernardo Fort-Brescia is a founding principal of Arquitectonica, whose designs have won multiple awards from the American Institute of Architects Design and at the Progressive Architecture Design Awards. Recently, the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum ran a four-month retrospective on Arquitectonica’s work throughout the world, focusing on the Times Square Redevelopment.

David Gianotten is general manager – architect at OMA Asia, in charge of the design and management of OMA’s conceptual plan for the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, the Taipei Performing Arts Centre in Taipei, and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange Headquarters in Shenzhen. Prior to OMA, he was managing director/architect at SeARCH Amsterdam. The office won the Aga Khan price for Architecture 2007 for the Dutch Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

As regional managing principal at Woods Bagot Asia, Stephen Jones has more than 15 years professional experience in Asia, Australia, the Middle East and Europe, where he has completed numerous significant projects. These cover all arenas: retail, educational, residential, commercial, hospitality and masterplanning, including the Tianjin Waterfront Development in China.