The brouhaha over the insult to Filipino doctors aired on American primetime television has not died down. Millions worldwide saw the segment from Desperate Housewives’ new season-premiere episode. It has been viewed tens of thousands of times more on YouTube and blogged in a cyber-torrent of indignation that has fueled signature campaigns, calls for boycotting the TV show, picket lines in front of Disney stores and now class-action suits.
In the segment, Teri Hatcher’s character Susan Mayer says, as she is about to be examined by a doctor: “Before we go any further, can I see those diplomas ’coz I just want to make sure that they’re not from some med school in the Philippines.” The line was meant to get a laugh — but at the expense of the thousands of Filipino medical practitioners without whom the American health care system would be seriously compromised.
The quip reflected the scriptwriter’s ignorance of this reality as well as a bias against Filipinos and other immigrants that exposes the bigotry that still pervades many societies. The reality is that Filipino professionals are well respected by their peers abroad. Their expertise and services are sought after in many specialties and fields of endeavor. In my field of design, Filipino architects, interior designers, landscape architects and urban designers quickly gain employment in international consultancy firms. There is little bias abroad against Filipino architects.
The sadder reality for Filipino designers actually lies at home where such a bias does exist. Glib references in American primetime comedies may unjustifiably paint migrant Filipino professionals as dubious in competence. But the insult cuts much deeper when it comes from fellow Filipinos in your own country.
The Asian crisis of the late ’90s left many Filipino architects with few projects to sustain them. With the economy recovering and real estate development booming one would think Filipino architects would be in demand and that Philippine architecture was about to see a renaissance. Not so.
Yes, there has been a rising demand for local architects’ services since 2002, but in the past year — when the really big and important projects started to be launched — it was disconcerting to note the increasing number of media announcements from name developers that highlighted the involvement of foreign consultants. A great number of ads and press releases now proudly proclaim this or that (usually American) architect, landscape architect or planner contributing to make a featured project “a distinctive master-planned community (or resort, or mixed-use commercial complex) comparable to those in the US, Europe or even Singapore.”
Now, hold on, before we go any further, aren’t there any laws that regulate the practice of architecture, interior design, landscape architecture and planning in the Philippines? Yes, there are. It seems though that many developers are unaware of, or are circumventing them, to be able to improve the marketability of their “products.” These companies (or their advertising and marketing consultants) are convinced that branding the structures and spaces they develop with the expertise of Filipino consultants diminishes their perceived value. I remember the head of one big company telling me, “The Philippines is not ready for a Filipino designer.” Now, that’s an insult.
Filipino design consultants in the Philippines are a discriminated-against lot. Many clients squeeze them to accept smaller and smaller fees for larger and larger scopes of work. Often they are paid late — three to four months after a billing is due (try doing that to a Filipino doctor or lawyer). On the other hand, the same client will pay an arm and a leg (often in dollars) for a foreign firm to submit a mere concept for a project (which the local architect will have to correct, anyway). One frustrated local Filipino consultant put it this way, “They (foreign consultants) get 10 times our fees to do one-tenth of the work without any of the legal liability (for public safety, which is the rationale behind licenses) and yet still get all the media mileage.”
Filipino architects and related design professionals are a creative lot. But when they try to submit fantastic designs they know will fit Filipino culture and climate, they are usually met with “Huwag na lang, mukhang masyadong mahal at sayang yung area na mabebenta. (Let’s not do it. It seems to be too expensive and we will lose sellable space.)” Architects have related to me that the same idea espoused by a foreign consultant gets clients’ heads nodding — despite the huge amount of space and cost “lost” to non-revenue-generating design fillips.
There are current steps being taken by professional design associations like the United Architects of the Philippines, the Philippine Institute of Interior Designers and the Philippine Association of Landscape Architects to prevent illegal practice, but mainly these have been aimed at fellow Filipinos who do not have legal licenses to practice. Many of these well known designers have become celebrity consultants mainly because of the extensive media coverage that they have gotten from creations for the Philippines’ rich and famous. (It’s the media’s fault again!)
As it turns out, almost all of these Filipinos graduated from American or English universities and worked for a spell abroad. Obviously local wealthy clients do have a bias towards these talented but otherwise unlicensed architects. For the licensed ones, a degree from a foreign university or track record abroad does carry much weight in a client’s decisions. Are our design schools not producing architects with the skill sets, creative capacities or talent good enough for local clients? Are our local design firms not prestigious enough to guarantee a pedigree for future Leandro Locsins and Willy Coscolluelas (both of whom were schooled in the Philippines)?
The whole situation has Filipino architects and related design professionals desperate. They are talented but cannot find good work. Filipino design firms are desperate to make ends meet because, often, clients are only willing to pay minimum fees while expecting unreasonable amounts of time and energy from them. These firms cannot design noteworthy buildings because clients tend to scrimp on construction budgets if the architect is local (they reserve the bigger budgets for foreign consultants — who get the prestigious projects anyway). Local banks are no help either as they do not lend capital to architectural firms — biased as they are to lend to large industries, BPO or IT companies or to, well, other banks.
Individual architects or designers working for Filipino firms themselves are desperate to earn a living because these companies cannot afford to pay them any better (because of the low fees above). So countless young architects look for a job abroad to improve their lot. The irony is that many Filipino designers end up in the very foreign firms that find work in the Philippines. Even worse, foreign firms have now set up shop locally to process work from America, Europe or the Middle East — hiring even fresh graduates and further eroding the local talent pool needed for Philippine projects. Local firms now see that they need to pay much higher starting salaries for fresh people who will leave them soon anyway for abroad or local outsourcing operations. As one Filipino architect with a small design firm succinctly remarked, “Architectural practice today just sucks.”
How can Filipino consultants survive? Even worse, how can Philippine architecture and design progress when the opportunity to create distinctive buildings, interiors, landscapes, and urban design is given to foreigners or Filipinos regurgitating foreign form and spaces? How desperate have we become as a society when we aspire to live in structures and settings alien to our culture and will pay the price for the illusion? How vacuous could Teri Hatcher have been to mouth what should have been an obvious racial slur?
The truth is that we still have that colonial mindset. We (or at least advertising and marketing people) believe that foreign is better. We can’t change it. Or can we? Malaysia banned advertising that used foreign models and it has mitigated this bias. Foreign architects there and in Singapore can only practice within strict laws and limitations. Philippine architecture designed by Filipino architects can be world-class if only local clients would trust them to do what foreign clients know they can do (and so long as Filipino consultants get paid justly and on time). Philippine architectural education can improve their curricula to shore up architectural history, theory and criticism so we can produce real architects with ideologies, social consciousness and intellectual depth and not just robots with computer drafting skills.
The final truth is that Desperate Housewives is rating low and may be on its final season anyway, so a boycott will only hasten the inevitable … and when will we see Filipino doctors and nurses on those American hospital TV shows?
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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.