The great unlearning.

This dramatic (if not brash) institute is intended both to project an image of technical progress and to respond to the tropical climate with least use of artificially produced energy by exploiting the geometries of site and section.

The Institute of Technical Education (ITE) is a development of Akitek Tenggara' exploration of a modern architectural language for the tropics.

Two 250m long parallel blocks of accommodation are separated by a strip of landscape 18m wide. They are gently bent to a curve with an inside radius of 170m. The four-storey-high blocks are punctured at intervals along the facade t permit prevailing breezes to pass through the structure.

The curved roof has a wide overhang which gives protection from the rain and sun. The overhang is supported on a secondary steel frame which also carries aerolon Iouvres which shield the external walls.

The building projects a striking image of raw technology with steel bridges across the gap between the two linear blocks. Everything is stripped to essentials: decoration is superfluous; every component has a structural reason or is an essential climatic controlling device.

The building is entered on the west, into a soaring, naturally ventilated atriu and open-to-sky auditorium. The roof is a high curved steel frame with open sides. The place is perhaps not entirely suitable for its users in a tropical thunderstorm but at other times it is the hub of the complex. An industrial glass lift ascends within the atrium and is connected by flying bridges to the intermediate floors of the teaching blocks.

The architectural language is consistent throughout. The building celebrates technology poetically, The central street is reminiscent of Tay Kheng Soon's ideas for Kampong Bugis DGP; it is high and narrow with overhanging roofs that effectively give shade throughout the day. Non-reflective landscape helps to cool the building.

Two elements could be better. The alignment of the gutter could be improved -- difficult though it is, for it curves in two directions. And the soft landscape is handled with less confidence than the structural elements and appears perfunctory.

This criticism aside, this is seminal building advancing Tay Kheng Soon's advocacy of a design language for the tropics which emphasises line, edge, mesh and shade, rather than an architecture of plane, volume, solid and void. Tay suggests that 'an unlearning process is involved, given the dominance of European architecture which has formed the basics of architectural training for the past 200 years'.