Fumihiko Maki.

Following a two-year journey in South-East Asia and the Middle East regions in 1958-1960, I published a book entitled Investigations in Collective Form describing and illustrating three approaches to collective form--compositional form, group form, and megaform. They define three basic relationships that always exist between individual elements and the whole. Although I stated that these were models of thinking about ways to conceive large complex forms, it is likely that these three concepts will appear either combined or mixed. They are not intended to be mutually exclusive but can coexist in one configuration.

Some forty years later in 2002, I drafted a diagram in a study for a competition entry for a new campus for the Republic Polytechnic in Singapore. This 240 000sqm project was planned on primarily undeveloped land. The diagram communicates the critical spatial functional requirement suggested by the competition brief founded on a new educational system in Singapore known as 'PBL'--Problem Based Learning. This programme calls for multiple units of spaces replacing the traditional classroom in what has been called the Study Cluster. This is where the 'Facilitator', the instructor, at the beginning of each day presents the problem. The students are then required to seek the solution in the library, media centre, workshops, dry labs/wet labs/clean rooms, and so on. These shared functions have been placed in a cascading ovoid base 240m long x 180m wide x 9m high, that we have called the Agora, whose roof has been designed as a floating roof garden--a Lawn. At the end of each day, the students return to reconvene at the study cluster to present their own solution to the problem that was given. The diagram has been manifested into a more architectonic reality planned for completion in 2006. The two diagrams, one generic and the other specific, served as the guiding principal force of the project. I always evaluate and consider that the best diagram is one that is simple because the power lies in its suggestiveness for broader interpretation. FUMIHIKO MAKI, MAKI & ASSOCIATES

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Admired: Perhaps the single influential diagrammatic sketch which captures the spirit of modernity and evokes a new architecture is the one by Le Corbusier. In a single stroke, the guiding principles which have shaped and liberalised the concept of space have been implied. The roof as garden, the pilotis to free the ground plane, the separation of structure and space--the free plan, and the concept of screens and brise soleil as enclosure. The diagram embodies principles of space that have been embraced by countless architects who have followed pursuit.