Beyond Walls

The drive through the 5th Avenue stretch at the Bonifacio Development is a smooth and gentle ride that lends fleeting images. Beyond this wide avenue, the merging of the cityscape with the foreground of open spaces offers gratifying moments of respite from the unsettling maze just minutes away. You’ll see kites flying on some afternoons, wide expanse of nothingness with just the sprouting of trees recently planted. It is a view that one must snatch and keep as a souvenir.

Maybe it is age catching up with me that I feel such nostalgic longing for open spaces now long gone to occupy our cities. I shudder at the thought that one day, perhaps even gardens would have to be encased into small corners because there won’t be any place for them. The absence of open spaces removes the vacuum that creates the spells we all need to be able to breathe and feel fresh air. In my early days at Pratt, we were asked to draw the space around the subject and not the subject itself. In reverse, such portrayal was like seeing through a film negative. These exercises were intended to sensitize our sensibilities towards the negative space, the distance between objects, persons and us. Without the negative space, our vision of space would be bland and flat.

In Japanese design, I once read that the significance of the distance between man and his "Ma," (God) is reflected between volumes of mass in space. The space in between is its "negative space." We admire so much the stillness reflected in their gardens, and the serene portrayals of their spaces. In 1966, Edward T. Hall came out with his book The Hidden Dimension, which examines the way we use space in public and in private. There is an existence of a social and personal space, which establishes affinities between people, zones which, even beyond them, have underlying implications. You feel somehow violated when some stranger comes close into your personal space. Such encroachment is discomforting because within that sphere of approach, you no longer have control of your position. In a modern world that is moving towards a seamless border, losing space and personal zone could likewise create psychological disorder. It is vital that in engaging with the periphery, the architect must be aware of the existence of personal spaces.

Architecture, it seems, is not spared of the trappings of banality. Every architect has to deal with the constants that have to be met as requirements, be it with the client’s wishes or the manner that houses or buildings have to be built. Then, of course, the biggest thing of them all is economics! Having said that, what can make architectural tasks any special are the little inventions that architects come up with to bring out the best in whatever is there left to do. I think that every designer has his way of interpreting complexity and it is through such perceptions that ideas emerge.

To me, what is significant is to view architecture as a part of a larger system, its periphery. The pace of life in today’s world is faster than it has ever been, and stress is both a key to motivate and entrap us. The home is, therefore, a sanctuary of rest, a place that can re-invigorate and refresh us when we return back from work, a place where children could relate to not in terms of urban blandness, but in a landscape of varying activities.

Dealing with such complexities involve both our living areas and their peripheries. I say periphery because, when architecture contains itself only within its walls, its purpose of continuity is fractured. As architecture becomes urbanized, it grows to be a part of a greater whole. It used to be that people lived in houses, and people worked in buildings. These days, people live in buildings where there are people working, and work in homes that people live in. The street used to be pedestrian walks, and now they have become interiorized and contained in malls, and malls have become pedestrian walks as connection infrastructure. The city itself has somehow become an enlarged mall, complete with an intricate army of facilities and events. The seamless borders indicate a huge network that has become invisibly the framework where we all belong.

Without understanding the complex organization that affects our periphery, the role of the architect will slowly ebb in decadence. It is never wise to resist the various transformations that are emerging. To move forward, architecture must not skip and nudge the obvious. Instead, it is with awareness that a system could be employed, "just as an antidote to a virus is a product of immunization with the same virus." As such, the application of new building technologies, the role of process in mitigating construction failures, and the assimilation of seamless integration between architecture and its periphery, offer serious thoughts to narrow the gaps of development.

Engaging new territories, beyond walls, often lead to ideas that in some ways both tread between the edges of daydreaming and creativity, that of fetish and audacity. While judgment may seem biased at first, logic would seem sensible where lifestyles seem to change as swiftly as fashion. Pods that serve as garden parlors for house guests replace the traditional patios, becoming outdoor sculptures. They offer a good substitute in a city landscape fabric that has very few trees and where walls are put up in place of open peripheries. The diagram of a rooftop art gallery serving as an artist’s a home and studio takes the periphery into its roofs. In Germany, whatever is lost in the ground because of building on it is supplanted above in its roof deck by a way of compensation. Tight condominium units could be transformed into large and expansive furniture systems, where even the windows could be treated as a textured relief. They not only confront the city activities outside, but also change into light filters in the day or nighttime. For those vertical dwellers, a unit that hovers over like clouds, picking up the pattern of the city arteries ofers relief from the feeling of being restricted inside one’s pigeonhole. In other instances, wave-like ceiling bands to create streaks of soft lighting at night could all the more ease up stress build-up from a day’s work, or in other cases, where the ceiling is both a light source, and an object. Today’s response to overlapping complexities could be more effective when spatial solutions net simple yet unexplored conventions.

The patterns of behavior in relation to time and motion have by now become rather erratic. The implication of new technologies and the influence of global networking have changed much of our activities to overlap and simulate abnormal conditions. Speed extends to lesser cost and quicker transitions. Such factors have become influential platforms to initiate changes in the manner by which houses, buildings, public and private spaces, and objects are used. Furniture are moving towards being versatile and multi-faceted. Gone are those when they remain passive in one corner. These days, furniture either exhibit flexibility within themselves in order to be used in a variety of activities. There are also transit furniture utilized in spaces of movements, like airports, hotel foyers, diners, gardens, and homes. Kitchen systems that serve as dining tables for family activities reduce the allocation of space, a convenient solution to condominium living. Chairs that are built light using aerospace technology that lessens cost of transport. Flowerpots that merge their the landscape by means of a twisting metal tip. Bathroom showers built so thinly, that they almost lie flat into the floor, holding only a panel of glass as their enclosure. A shell-like shower enclosure that could be assimilated into a sleeping room, or office. Systems such as wardrobe, partition walls that have become almost invisible as they integrate their role both as an encasement and furniture, represent new typologies for the home interiors.

Architecture and the design of objects work in tandem. Where you live needs what you want to live with. Living beyond walls means knocking down convention and revolutionizing quality for the future. It is paring down excesses in order to bring about the effects of the voids, where the negative space significantly transcends its role of mediation between another and one’s self.

The merging affinities between art, architecture, design, and other disciplines create landscapes by which even interior peripheries could materialize. In some instances, the collaboration and cross-linking of such typologies forge interesting results: A jewelry store, for instance, alluding to tall and long skyscrapers acting as jewelry encasements, and a small shop that blossoms from a folding object like an umbrella. Or situating bedrooms to be part of a timberland as interstitial spaces to reprise forest cabins serving as washrooms, throwing conventional milieus into new territories where the garden landscape becomes part of its inner zones.

Architecture mutates into new ephemeral bodies when its existence with the periphery becomes ambivalent as time moves on. A house conceived to be a kind of gigantic garden lantern, whose role is to link its architectural body with that of its landscape. Or, a house whose main structure is interceded by large tracts of green voids that offer different spells of outdoor activities to de-emphasize it as a structure. In small lots that are confined along the edge, a spiraling landscape of ramps and voids with its external structure folding and unfolding offers shifts related to adaptation. Another example would be a house generated through the use of an enlarged structure like a beam acting as its own space and merging into its landscape.

Nowadays, our periphery is a recurring theme and a cause of concern among architects, urban planners, designers, artists and individuals in the world. It must be. After all, nature and man will always be "bacon and eggs." With the versatility offered in objects for home living, requirement for space could be re-evaluated and made compact. Making space for the voids, the spells, and the greenery would certainly extend modern living to one that is sustainable and eco-friendly. Whether we build vertically or horizontally, for as long as we include the periphery as a part of a whole, we can at least come up with pockets of continuity and freedom. Hopefully, it rubs off on a greater majority and its application to unclog the cityscape could be made larger.

Indeed the drive through the long stretch of 5th Avenue in Bonifacio is a travel I always look forward to these days. It is my respite, after an exhausting day’s work. It is my wake-up call before the day’s work begins. It is therapeutic mentally for me because it puts me back close to the earth, with a perspective to see things beyond walls.