Talk delivered at BluPrint 20th Anniversary
Intramuros Ballroom, Manila House, Taguig City
Thursday, November 21, 2019
I’d like to begin with Architecture, and to
discuss how we make it. It begins with a
quest for a concept. We sift through the
various components of a project: site, context, climate, client, culture,
community, program, codes, etc. All are
elements that become a pragmatic clay that our hands begin to shape into a kind
of narrative.
The analysis and interpretation of these
elements help to generate a response that soon takes form: a diagram or word or
story, or sometimes a wordless story.
It is quite organic, and as the project progresses becomes a force that
comes alive.
INVISIBLE BECOMING VISIBLE
It is an organic demanding force that will
not let you rest. You ask or cajole it
with the question “What? What do you want?” and that organic demanding force
looks back at you in silence and so you and your team return to the drawing
board and try to answer the “What” by going into the territory of the “Why”,
into the realm of reason and purpose. If,
in the process of designing the building, you have a reason and purpose for
every move you make – if the arbitrary is absent – then the organic demanding
force begins to take the form of architecture. It takes form in drawings and
models until it becomes tangible in actual built form. The invisible becomes visible.
MOVE THE SPIRIT
When that form is built, and if the gods
smile, chances are good that the visible once again becomes invisible in the
sense of the sublime. John Hejduk, the
great dean of Cooper Union, the school of art and architecture in New York,
once said: "The fundamental issue
of architecture is that does it affect the spirit or doesn't it. If it doesn't
affect the spirit, it's building. If it affects the spirit, it's architecture."
AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
I like to think of these experiences as
moments of grace. They don’t happen very
often, but when they do, you rarely if ever forget them. This impact on the spirit may also be called
an “aesthetic experience.” The English
art critic Clive Bell said: “The
starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of
a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of
art.”
We can be more specific about some of these
objects and call them architecture.
Architecture as the generator of that “peculiar emotion.”
I learned the term “aesthetic experience”
in my fifth year of architecture school, in a class on art theory that was
quite unforgettable because it gave a name to that “peculiar emotion” that I
had felt at various times, such as when I first saw the Pantheon in Rome or the
work of the great Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. Scarpa’s Fondazione Querini Stampalia in
Venice and his Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona were my first encounters with
architecture that was a conscious and sensitive dialogue between old and new,
past and present, in a way that created a whole that was greater than the sum
of its parts.
VISIBLE BECOMING INVISIBLE
With the design of new architecture, we speak
of the process of the invisible becoming visible, of how the concept or the
story becomes the built form. In the
process of conservation or of adaptive reuse, there is an extra phase that
precedes that, the process of the visible becoming invisible, of how an
existing site or structure enters the realm of our experience and understanding.
A concrete example of this is the
experience of visiting the Department of Tourism building on Rizal Park for the
first time, when we were competing for the project to design the National
Museum of Natural History. The plan of
Antonio Toledo’s design from 1939 is of a courtyard surrounded by a polygon of
straight flanks, except for the main flank, which was curved, facing the main
entrance stairs. I recall the sensation
of walking through the long straight corridors, and of seeing the dynamic of
the straight corridors with the curved flank approaching. That notion of the curve in plan would
inspire the notion of the curve in section, which we see in the dome of the
Tree of Life.
This sounds extremely simple, but it is of
enduring fascination for me, this alchemy of idea becoming form, and of form
becoming idea, emotion or consciousness.
It is an alteration of state, like the Transubstantiation, which is
indeed of enduring fascination if not salvation.
How does this happen? This is where the
qualities of Significance and Authenticity are essential.
SIGNIFICANCE
Clive Bell, the English art critic, asked
“What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?”
and answered with “Significant form”, “lines and colors combined in a
particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, that stir our aesthetic
emotions.”
Doesn’t this bring to mind Le Corbusier’s
definition of Architecture as “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of
volumes brought together in light?”
In conservation, the term Significance
refers to the sum of the tangible and intangible values or attributes that make
a place important, meaningful, and memorable.
The heart of a Conservation Management Plan, or CMP, is the Statement of
Significance and the hierarchy that accompanies it.
AUTHENTICITY
Authenticity
is the quality of being genuine and real.
In conservation, Authenticity refers to the originality of these
materials and components. In design I
would venture to say that it is faithfulness and sensitivity to context and
purpose. Nothing arbitrary.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, in commemoration of Leandro
Locsin’s recent 25th death anniversary, and as a summation of this
discussion on the visible, invisible, significant, and authentic, I would like
to read the last four paragraphs of an article called “A Noble Simplicity: the
Last Project of Leandro Locsin” that I wrote for the June 2010 issue of
BluPrint, about The Church of the Transfiguration in the Benedictine Monastery
of the Transfiguration in Malaybalay, Bukidnon.
“On the last full day of our visit to
Malaybalay, a few of us had gathered in the pre-dawn darkness to join the monks
in their 5 a.m. Laudes, the prayers chanted before sunrise. The pyramidal shape of the roof seemed
acoustically perfect for the Benedictine chants. Laudes was followed by mass, and at the
moment when the priest was raising his arms to consecrate the host, the waking
sun was beginning to shoot its first rays over the lid of the distant
mountains, washing the altar rock with its concurring light.
Our last visit to the church was for the 5
p.m. vespers.
In the last chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s
“Brideshead Revisited”, the protagonist describes the flickering of the
tabernacle light in the chapel of an ancient English Catholic family that he
was revisiting after many years.
“Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out
of their work…a small red flame...It could not have been lit but for the
builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew…”
As incense smoke rose in an S curve by the
side of the altar rock heading towards the dark apex of the ceiling, this last
chapter came to mind, as a kind of summation of my visit here. This was the same smoke that rose by the side
of many other altars, many hundreds of years ago, in many other places. There was a power outage here in the
gathering dusk of Mindanao, and as vespers were ending, the sun brought its
diminishing light only to that smoke.
Arch. Locsin’s Church of the
Transfiguration was completely one with nature and with the liturgy.”
