Shinjuku Station Project in Tokyo, 1960. Courtesy by Maki & Associates. 

Context in source publication

Context 1

... in ASEAN countries. Together with his student Koichi Nagashima, who was teaching at the National University of Singapore, Maki completed the design for the Kota Kinabalu Sports Complex and Park in Sabah, East Malaysia, in 1975 (see Fig. 10). Maki credited this early project to a group of APAC members who had been drawing him to the tropical regions since the 1960s. When William Lim was engaged in the Malaysian Zara project, he invited APAC members to Singapore to consult. According to Nagashima, it was due to this journey that he and Maki got the Kota Kinabalu project d a 160-ha site near Likas Bay in Sabah, East Malaysia. Sabah was once positioned at the center of the confrontation with the Philippines during the independence movement. To ease regional con fl icts, Japan took an active role in international affairs, for the fi rst time since WWII, and organized a bilateral negotiation (Sudo, 2003). Sabah, therefore, might owe a partial debt to Japan's engagement on its behalf, and thus extend more good will than other Malaysian regions that rejected a Japanese presence. Maki also contributed indirectly to Nagashima's proposal for Manila's urban environment in 1975, with the same principle of sustainability. With features such as pedestrian shade and all- weather shopping malls, the Sabah proposal re fi ned the treat- ment of tropical architecture reminiscent of that used to create the National Aquarium in Okinawa. It was ideal for Maki to gain information on and connections to Southeast Asian architecture through this association with APAC. Its establishment in 1966 by William Lim from Singapore, Sumet Jumsai from Bangkok, and Maki and Nagashima from Japan empowered a base from which to exchange architectural ideas and even personnel between the members (Lim, Maki, Nagashima, & Jumsai, 1980). Routine meetings were decided; however, for Maki and Nagashima, the collaboration with APAC was different due to the organization's lack of integrity and political aspiration. Given its partial utopian and bourgeois ideas on architecture, there was no intention to ally the power of states. Rather, the responsibility was to take care of the poor. As Nagashima explained, “ Politically, only professionals do not play up to the powers ” (Lim et al., 1980). The general intelligentsia, as Maki called them, had to de fi ne themselves in various ways by building in developing states that confronted diversi fi ed problems inherent in regions, cultures, and beliefs. This responsibility was a heavy burden. Perhaps a better solution in this context would have been to just “ have exchanges with local intelligentsia of those countries ” and keep a limited degree of inter- vention in design. Maki would probably agree that APAC might play a casual but important role in leading such a learning process by introducing Japanese modern architecture to ASEAN in a voluntary manner, as during the 1970 Expo. APAC's strategy was to be a precious natural reserve for intel- lectual exchange rather than a market for bargaining prices and pro fi ts. Maki was clearly reluctant to engage in mercantilism, and both William Lim and Tay Kheng Soon believed that Maki's design tastes, although unique, were intellectually “ poor ” from a political perspective. In the case of Singapore, purely political sensitivity resulted in privileged architectural design through Tange's successful governmental connection with Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and I. M. Pei's connection to Mr. Liu Thai Ker, Chief Planner for the city state who once worked for Pei temporarily. It is thus not surprising to fi nd that Maki, after the Sabah proposal, waited a long time before accepting another proposal in Southeast Asia; namely, Singapore's Institute of Technical Education (ITE) in 2002 (see Fig. 11, upper left). He fi nally applied his upgraded “ collective forms ” to the Republic Polytechnic (RPS) campus in Singapore in 2007 (see Fig. 11, upper right, lower left and right). RPS is the largest of Maki's projects overseas. He won the First Prize in an invited competition and was authorized to do both master planning for the campus and the architectural design of facilities with a gross fl oor area of 210,000 m 2 . The orientation of the campus clearly re fl ects Maki's principle of a “ high-density collective form ” in the connections between six storage “ learning pods ” and two all-encompassed, double-layered elliptical spaces called the “ Lawn ” and the “ Agora ” (Maki, 2010). The isolated and identical pods suggest horizontal movement along the surface of the central congregational space. Bridges and sheltered corridors provide loose but necessary attachments between the central nu- cleus and the auxiliary facilities. By deploying repetitive pods in a sequential arrangement, Maki succeeded in creating the sense of fabric “ linkage. ” Thus, it is not far-fetched to see the powerful mega-plate of the Agora as highly resembling Maki's proposal for the Shinjuku project in 1960 (Fig. 12), for which a raised arti fi cial platform symbolized the urban form and its occupations and boundaries. The Shinjuku project's lifted zone circumscribes a de fi ned area for the shopping center and of fi ce and entertainment facilities, which sit like fl ower petals around the modularized building complex, suggesting the surface of a giant water pond d made possible by “ dynamic equilibrium ” (Taylor & Conner, 2003). Identically, the high-density architecture of the RPS campus articulates the eight isolated courtyards of Agora and pi- azzas as its porous “ city rooms, ” transforming itself into part of the unfolding urban fabric of a modern arti fi cial city. Until the early post-war period, Japanese architecture had a hallmark “ derivativeness ” compared with its Western counterpart. Through its subsequent development, Japanese architecture re- emerged with an indigenous appearance and speci fi ed local con- cerns. Through its self-recreation into a new avant-garde movement and by translating itself into various local contexts, it provided a deviating paradigm that acted as a counterweight to Eurocentric modern architecture, and ultimately interacted with the latter from a place of Asian idiosyncrasy. The same prerequisites for international trade have contributed equally to the ASEAN region's economic boom and local identity. Although architectural modernism was once accepted without challenge by Southeast Asian developmental states in the 1960s, the same might not have been true for the following decade d perhaps usurped by a determined cultural religion and appreciation of political needs. A dual progress of modernity was thus equally welcomed by Japanese architects such as Tange, Maki, Kurokawa, and Arata and their counterparts in Southeast Asia such as William S. W. Lim, Sumet Jumsai, Leandro V. Locsin, and Ken Yeang. However, a shared intention to achieve modernity could lead in distinctive directions if accompanied by such an ...