What A Relief!
June 23, 2001 | 12:00am
God is in the details," said the famous architect Mies Van der Rohe. Details in architecture are made distinctive in several ways, one of which is by the use of sculptural relief. Classical Greece, ancient Egypt, imperial Rome and, later on, Paris, London and Washington DC were filled with architecture that told stories via friezes and sculpted panels. These adorned the façades and walls of their civic and public structures rendering elegant settings for public life.
There are places in our metropolis that are or had been made memorable by such architectural embellishments. These lent character to both the building they adorned and the spaces, both indoor and outside, that they helped define.
Today, we’re going to look at some of these sculptural reliefs, the materials used, sculptors involved and the future of this facet of our material culture.
Ayala corner Paseo was not blessed with a plaza but it has made up for this deficiency with the sculptural relief on the imposing façade of the Insular Life Building, as well as the Ninoy Aquino statue at one corner. National Artist Napoleon Abueva sculpted scenes from the Philippine countryside and the emerging modern landscape of the Sixties. His composition in mezzo relievo blended well with Cesar Concio’s "international modern" tower and gave it a human touch and scale sorely missing in many of today’s generic skyscrapers.
On a larger scale, we have the Quezon City Hall Complex mural/relief. Created by Eugenio Bunuan and carved out of adobe, the relief depicts the life of Manuel L. Quezon. Scenes include his ancestral house of nipa, the commonwealth years, the escape to Australia at the outbreak of the war, and the Quezon Memorial.
Central to this composition is Quezon in his famous clenched-fisted, "…a government run like hell by the Filipinos!" stance. This central figure is nine meters tall while the whole relief itself is on a surface 10 by 40 meters in dimension. The architect for the building was Ruperto Gaite (another of an almost forgotten generation of Filipino architects whom I hope to feature soon).
The Quezon mural was made this big to match the grandiose scale of the Quezon Memorial Circle. The circle was originally intended to house a huge capitol building for the new Philippine republic. Construction was started in 1941 but was derailed by the war. After the war, the structure was relocated to the present Batasan site and replaced by a 66-meter memorial. The memorial also has a series of reliefs at its base showing, again, scenes from Philippine history. Both works give a texture to these structures and build narrative links to the past, though most of this is lost to the inadequacy of the surrounding urban design.
Back in central Manila and at a smaller scale, we have the most intriguing of all architectural reliefs I have ever encountered. It is the four-story high-relief that adorns one end of what was formerly the Meralco head office. Located behind the YMCA (now Shoemart), the Art Deco building, complete with air-conditioning and large expanses of glazing, was the most modern structure in pre-war Manila.
The relief anchored one end of the steamship-like structure. The sculptor is unknown. It shows a composition of several muses swirling upward in stylized waves. The women look Eurasian and remind me of paintings by Tamara de Lempica, a painter of the Art Deco period. The building and relief were landmarks in the heady days before the Second World War. The trauma of the war cast a layer of grit and neglect, which effectively erased this structure from people’s memories.
The three examples above were works in cast concrete or adobe-concrete. Filipino artists and craftsmen had, by the time these projects were constructed, developed a facility with concrete. In previous centuries they worked with wood and stone (coral or volcanic). Wonderful examples are the carved doors of San Agustin church, which survived the destruction of Intramuros. Countless other structures that manage to survive from the Spanish colonial era also show our mastery of these mediums.
Contemporary artists and sculptors have expanded their palette of materials. Ramon Orlina works in glass while Eduardo Castrillo manipulates in metal. Other sculptors have experimented with stainless steel and plastic. But few – including the established ones like Castrillo, Orlina, Abueva and Caedo – ever get much opportunity to produce work in close association with Filipino architects. There have also been a number of ill-designed sculptural settings lately that mar rather than enhance the disappearing public realm. How can we accept mediocrity when we are capable of much better?
This was not the case in the Fifties and Sixties when clients still patronized Filipino consultants and artists. The Philippine Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 was good evidence of this ideal collaboration. A carved mural, six by 16 feet (approximately 2x15.3 meters), was commissioned for the fair and awarded to Botong Francisco. It consisted of 12 scenes from Philippine history and was one of the most photographed sites of the pavilion.
The original mural, sketched by Botong, was translated into acacia wood by carvers from Paete. Antonio Madrinan, an architect from that town, transferred Botong’s designs onto the raw panels which were then carved and finished by the Fadul family and 50 assistants. It took them seven months to complete the panels before they were shipped to New York. There they were installed in a setting designed by Otelio Arellano, whose salakot-inspired structure rivaled the Unisphere as the fair’s most memorable images.
The minimalism of modern architecture is today criticized for its lack of character and soul. South America was able to adapt its modernist architecture with the infusion of color and texture, with heavy doses of local art and sculpture. We had tried to do the same but our expression was cut off early because of the lack of opportunity in the Seventies. And because of the abandonment of Filipino talent by clients in the late Eighties and Nineties. We have also been prone to demolishing past glories because of the exigencies of politics or real-estate greed.
Our modern city spaces and structures are now defined more by the tastes of designers from New York, San Francisco, Tokyo and Hong Kong rather than the sensitivities of equally talented Filipino artists, sculptors, architects, interior designers and landscape architects. Our cities now are adorned with altars to foreign gods of consumerism and globalization.
Instead of an indigenous modernism that we need to nurture and evolve in our architecture and urban design, we succumb easily to the pre-processed artifact and artifice of a Disneyfied global culture. Instead of expressions of sculpture that valorize Filipino values and history, we adorn our corporate plazas, building lobbies and public spaces with off-the-shelf art, water features and monuments to our distrust in Filipino talent, Filipino art and Filipino identity.
God made us in His image but if we look today at the details of our architecture, we find little that reflects who we truly are or who we aspire to be.
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