BluPrint first caught my eye in the summer of 1999, not the best year to launch into a new venture in anything. But then, looking back, it probably was the best time. Rereading the editor’s note of the inaugural issue, Tina Bonoan presented the magazine’s aim, that of partnering the Filipino designer in her or his quest of creative "becoming." It is a quest that looks at a new century full of promise, a new beginning.
Two years later, BluPrint has established itself as a reliable source and a vital venue for the discourse sorely lacking in Philippine architecture. Compared to other fields like art, entertainment and fashion, architecture and its related fields of landscape architecture, urban design, planning and industrial design have found little space in either popular or intellectual consciousness. With magazines like BluPrint, and an emerging crop of critics and writers, all that is changing.
True change and true "becoming" can only be achieved with vision. Now we look at BluPrint’s ambitious review of the last hundred years of change and "becoming" in Philippine design.
This diversity has been sumptuously presented by the magazine in images culled from archives and sources that have been difficult to source. (I should know since I spend half my time digging for them myself.) Working on the two-issue project were Tina’s powerhouse team of Gerard Licu, Ringo Bunoan, Edson Cabalfin, Alice Guillermo, and Cora Llamas.
The narrative of Philippine design is told in picture and textual blocks of 10 years or so. The first issue covers 1900-1950, from the American colonial period to the Second World War and post-war recovery and political independence.
The magazine spreads are well-laid out and engaging. Readers are given a glimpse of the influences on and products of Philippine visual arts, graphics, fashion, theater, cinema and architecture. The text is concise but substantial. Bonoan and her team also give us personalities, faces to link to the objects of our material culture.
This is important, as few readers would be familiar with the likes of Arellano, Nakpil, Andres Luna de San Pedro, Pablo Antonio and other greats of Philippine architecture. Our students and young designers are ironically more familiar with Frank Lloyd Wright, IM Pei and Michael Graves.
The review relates the development of Philippine architecture to those of other visual arts, commercial graphic design and advertising. The chronology is also matched against progress in the movies, a venue that provides another mirror to the era’s changing fashions and lifestyles. (Philippine movies also do provide a source for Philippine architecture and urbanism as they recorded scenes from a Manila now gone and disappearing.)
The American influence is shown as shaping most of architecture and design in the first years, directly at first through American architects and planners like Daniel Burnham and William Parsons, then indirectly through the work of American-trained architects like Arellano and Toledo. This influence wanes but does not disappear as these Filipino designers adapt and more consciously express themselves with local themes and indigenized embellishment.
The review takes us from the colonial Neo-Classic and Art Noveau idioms to the Moderne and Art Deco phases of architectural development, giving us a clear framework for identifying and appreciating the structures of that era. So too, with other aspects of material culture as furniture, tableware and fashion.
This influence is disrupted by the Second World War. The Japanese influence, mainly on graphic design, highlights a forgotten period that needs to be further researched. The trauma of the war and the painful recovery after affected the trajectory of Philippine design. The reaction was to recover lost lifestyles and the structures of the pre-war days.
Of great interest and importance in the review is the period of Romantic Vernacularism of the mid-Sixties. The reviewers narrate that "In the midst of resistance to the international style to the Philippine setting and its serial monotony, young architects and designers of the (period) began to re-appraise the country’s rich architectural and cultural heritage as a source of inspiration."
The architectural images from the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies remind us of the struggle that Filipino designers and architects had to go through to seek a proper vocabulary for design. The retrospective also shows that it took all this time for the public – specifically clients – to accept and appreciate this effort and the products of cultural adaptation it embodied.
Again, few of our architects and design students of today are familiar with this earlier struggle and the names and structures associated with it – Otillo Arellano with his Philippine Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, Nestor de Castro’s Oriental Hotel, Felipe Mendoza’s Holiday Resort, and the Manosa brothers’ Sulu Restaurant.
The final decade’s treatment seems unfocused, probably because the period is too close in our memory that it is difficult to achieve the distance required for critical evaluation. It is disturbing to contrast this period with others in terms of efforts to find that identity and direction in Philippine design which started in the mid-Sixties.
The reality of mainly foreign-designed skyscrapers and building complexes using Filipino architects as "architects of record" (glorified draftsmen) is nowhere mentioned, save for images of the globalized "nowhere" skyscrapers rising in our cities. This omission may be the most important statement of the retrospective itself. The orgy of "brand name," foreign-faced, soul-less architecture of the Nineties, I believe, has been as traumatic and transformative to the project of evolving a true Philippine architecture as the Second World War and the initial American colonial impact.
BluPrint has dared to look back critically at a hundred years of struggle in Philippine design. But the onus is on us, the readers, to reflect on the images and narrative presented and to gain insight and appreciation of the effort that once again must be put into this process of "becoming." We must look back to the last century and even further for an appreciation of our roots, and look forward with a vision of what the Filipino soul should look like in our fashion, theater, art and ultimately our architecture.
BluPrint’’s "A Century of Design in the Philippines" issue is still available in bookstores nationwide. For the previous issue, call BluPrint at 631-28-59 or e-mail bluprint@I-manila.com.ph.
There will also be a special tour at the end of the month to celebrate Halloween. The tour will be an afternoon jaunt through the North and Chinese Cemeteries in Manila. Meeting place will be at the gates of the North Cemetery at 1:45 p.m. The tour will last approximately two-and-a-half hours. For details and bookings, call the HCS Secretariat at 527-21-98 or e-mail hcs@home-harbor.com.