Architects for a cause

Three designers show the spirit of giving by devoting themselves full time to building houses for the poor




Architects Bien Padua, Jomari Badilla and Acel Libed at the GK Baseco site in Tondo.



Less for self, more for others, enough for all—this is the motto of Gawad Kalinga, a poverty alleviation program initiated by the Couples for Christ around five years ago. It has an ambitious vision: a Philippines with no more slums. Its battle cry is to build 700,000 houses in 7,000 communities in 7 years. As of Novermber 4, 2004, they have built 8,645 homes in 338 communities.

Jomari Badilla, 24, and Acel Libed, 25, are architecture graduates who have taken this slogan to heart. Right after his graduation last March, Jomari committed himself full time to the Shelter Team, the core of volunteers who provide technical support for the various GK communities. Acel, who passed the architecture board exam last year, is thinking of doing the same thing.

Bien Padua , an architect who worked in construction, decided to volunteer full time for Gawad Kalinga last March. He was assigned to work as the site architect for Baseco, Tondo, a slum community near the Port Area which burned down earlier this year. Two weeks after his assignment, he decided to move into a 20sqm house in the community to be able to supervise the work better. So far he has managed the building of 208 houses; the construction of 280 more is due to be finished this December.

Get to know why these three have sacrificed a stable job and income in the name of service:

Why did you decide to volunteer full-time?

JOMARI: I had a conviction that this was where I was being led to help, especially since I’m an architecture graduate. I was a youth leader before, but it was mostly talk, and no action. I’m also attracted to mission work because members of my family are missionaries. This is my life.

ACEL: Jomari and I used to volunteer our design services for YFC (Youth for Christ) and CFC events, like stage design. Like him, I was also a youth leader, but we were just leading—we weren’t doing anything concrete. This is a higher form of service. Also, certain events in my life—like getting into the UST College of Architecture, and winning an Urban Housing Competition for the Urban Poor—helped me discern what I was supposed to do.

BIEN: In December 2003, I saw Gawad Kalinga’s work in Payatas on TV. I was touched with the spirit of bayanihan that GK promoted. Naisip ko, may kakayahan naman ako. I wanted to do my part in building the nation. So I promised to myself I would volunteer. But construction projects came and I got busy. But every time I received my pay, I remembered my promise. So in March, I called the GK office, and got assigned to Baseco. Frustrated ako sa buhay ko nun, pero nabuhayan ako.

What’s a typical day or week for you?

J: On Mondays, we report to the head office to talk about what needs to be done for the week. From Tuesday to Friday we check the various GK sites, if they are up to standard. We do quality control—checking the houses, the site development, and landscaping. We’re also the ones who recruit volunteers from schools. On weekends, we visit the site with them. Sometimes we also entertain foreigners who want to see the site.

A: Each GK community has its own design team, but we also submit designs and concepts for special projects. We have to meet deadlines. For example, if a project needs a concept right away, we have to draw it, scan and email. Nagpupuyat din kami. We also coordinate with companies and local government units who are our partners for the project.

B: My day starts with a short prayer. Then I look over the scope of work for the day. Then I call the lead foremen and discuss their specific assignments. Then I go around the site, to see if there are any materials that are lacking. I work here 25 hours a day, 8 days a week.

What are the challenges that you face?

J: Being a full-time volunteer is not easily understood by other people, especially our families. I don’t have money in the bank. We’re given an allowance that’s just enough for our needs. Pero hindi naman siya nagkukulang. May naghahatid, or may nagpapakain. I’m not worried about my future. In seven years, uunlad na rin ang Pilipinas, aangat na rin tayo.

A: Friends and family don’t accept it so easily. Sometimes I don’t know if I should feel proud or embarrassed about it. But so far the reception has been positive. The good thing is our network has widened with GK. Hindi kami nag-aalala kung saan kami pupulutin pagkatapos nito.

B: Working with the people. Yung ibang tao, reklamador. Pero pag nakikita ko yung ngiti ng tinutulungan ko, masaya na ako.

J: Sometimes the people in the community are suspicious. We have to prove to them that we are helping them wholeheartedly.

How has your life changed?

J: It has made my life simpler. I focus more on other people more than myself. It’s become our life. We talk, eat, live GK.

A: We have less gimmicks. I’m also less career-oriented now. Before I was really focused on it; I thought that at age 28, I would already have my own architectural office. Now I think less for myself, and more for others. I’m more blessed than them—I went to college; they didn’t.

B: Dati iniisip ko lang yung yumaman ako at magkaroon ako ng magandang trabaho, o kaya lumabas ng Pilipinas kung bumabagsak na. Pero nung nakita ko yung taong tutulungan ko, sabi ko, dito na ako.

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A shorter version of this article appears in Real Living's December 2004 issue. Interview by Amillah Rodil. Photo by Bahaghari MFI.

For more information, visit www.gawadkalinga.org.
The GK National Secretariat is located in 349 Ortigas Ave., East Greenhills, Mandaluyong City, Tel. Nos. 727-0681, 726-7261, or 723-1603, ask for Jomari or Acel if you're interested to volunteer.

Frank Lloyd Wright Home Demolished

From the Associated Press:

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - Fallingwater it was not: From its wind-stripped shingles to an embarrassing overgrowth of weeds and bramble, the erstwhile beach house on Lake Michigan's shore did little to declare itself a creation of the architectural luminary Frank Lloyd Wright.


Worth saving?

But that was no reason, say those who would preserve all of Wright's structures, to smash it into oblivion.

The 88-year-old beach house came tumbling down last week — the first Wright building to meet such a fate in more than 30 years — to make way for a four-bedroom home with a two-car garage. The last Wright structure to come down was Milwaukee's Arthur Munkwitz Apartments in 1973.

While there are those who maintain the ramshackle summer cottage in the village of Grand Beach was beyond meaningful repair, to destroy it was akin to shredding a sketch or lesser work of a great painter, said Ron Scherubel, executive director of The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. The group saved one of Wright's prefabricated homes in April.

"You want to preserve the entire body of work of a great artist," Scherubel said.

Scherubel said his group would have fought the demolition had they known it was coming. Although rumors swirled about the property changing hands, the conservancy didn't hear about the demolition plans until after they were carried out Nov. 8.

Given some warning, Scherubel said he would have tried to talk the new owners into other options, such as renovating or moving the home elsewhere.

"One of our restoration architects said even as bad as this one was, if somebody really wanted to, it could have been restored ... to its original appearance," Scherubel said.

The village of Grand Beach issued a demolition permit to Thomas and Irene Trainor of suburban Chicago on Oct. 28, said John Boden Jr., the building and zoning commissioner of the southwestern Michigan village just north of the Indiana border.

The new place isn't "going to be a big, giant house," Boden said. "It's going to fit in nice."

A telephone message left at the Trainors' residence in Homer Glen, Ill, wasn't immediately returned.

Wright was born in 1867 in Richland Center, Wis., and designed more than 1,000 structures, about half of which were built. When he died in 1959, Wright was America's most-celebrated architect.

About 350 of the 400 Wright-designed homes still exist, Scherubel said. Some have been lost to fire or natural disasters while others, such as the Grand Beach summer cottage originally built for someone named W.S. Carr, have been demolished. Over the years, a number of changes were made to the Carr house, and it fell into disrepair.

Boden, a carpenter who has restored old homes, said it would have been very costly and time-consuming to restore the Carr home. There also were other factors to consider.

"A Frank Lloyd Wright house, to me, is not the most energy-efficient home to have along the lake here," Boden said. "You get that wind howling down the lake in the winter and it gets rough on a house."

Scherubel agreed that it would have been a major renovation.

"It was in pretty bad shape," he said. "It would have taken somebody with a real commitment and interest in restoring it to have put the time and effort into it."

William Allin Storrer, adjunct professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin and author of "The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion" and "The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog," was even more blunt in his assessment.

"The building deserved to be torn down, and crying over its destruction brings to mind the story of the shepherd boy who cried 'wolf' once too often," Storrer said. "We must preserve that of Wright which truly represents his organic architectural principles, and the W.S. Carr house did not even when built, though it had the master's signature on the plan."

In April, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy saved a prefabricated Illinois home designed by Wright from threatened demolition, accepting it as a donation from a developer who didn't want it. The home was carefully dismantled to be reassembled and restored in Pennsylvania, the same state where Wright's trademark home, Fallingwater, sits perched above a stream.

The website of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy is at http://www.savewright.org/

art and furniture exhibit

open to public until nov 22!

LRI business plaza
210 Nicanor Garcia St (formerly Reposo)
Bel-Air 2, Makati City

Former Yale student sues designer of Freedom Tower

I remember some talk about teachers "borrowing" their students designs when I was a student at the university. I actually knew personally of one student whose design plate for a restaurant was copied by his teacher without his knowledge and he only knew about it when he saw the restaurant built.

Well who would have thought that it could happen to something involving a structure as prominent as the Freedom Tower in New York. Well it has.

Here are the details from the Associated Press:

A former architectural student sued the designers of the World Trade Center site's planned Freedom Tower on Monday, saying designs for the skyscraper mirror those he created at Yale University.

Thomas Shine, of Brookline, Mass., is seeking unspecified damages in federal court in Manhattan for what he said was the theft of his designs.


It's the "Freedom Tower" on the left
and "Olympic Tower" on the right.
You be the judge.

Named as defendants were David Childs and the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP. A message left with Childs at the firm was not immediately returned.

The lawsuit alleged that the Freedom Tower was "strikingly similar" to Shine's designs for a Manhattan building for the proposed 2012 Olympic Games in New York.

It said Childs saw the designs when he served in 1999 on a panel of jurists invited by the Yale School of Architecture to evaluate the students' work.

The Olympic design featured a twisting tower with a twisting structural grid and a textured facade, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleged that the design for the Freedom Tower shown to the public in December 2003 incorporated an identical structural grid.

The cornerstone was laid on July 4 for the Freedom Tower, which will be the first skyscraper to go up at the 16-acre trade center site.

The tower's final form is a compromise of designs by Childs and architect Daniel Libeskind, a designer of the master plan for redevelopment of the trade center site.

A Sketchy Grandstand Proposition

It's personally amusing what you can do with a pen and some markers while eating lunch.

For one, you can finally think of that alternative grandstand scheme you've promised to post since about two weeks ago but never came to doing and finally do it.

Here goes:

I imagine the grandstand to be something that is functional and would add to the value of the Sunken Garden. With that I imagine a sculpture which can act as a roof and blend in with the green as some of Abueva's sculpture do in the campus. I imagine it to be metal (to be lightweight for construction) and be finished with an aged matte stone look (to look stable and seem like it has been there forever).

I do not intend to make a monument so I want it to be low key. That is why I went with a flat horizontal roof. I don't want it too low key though that it just disappears completely and people wouldn't want to use it then.

That is why I also wanted to give it the sense of having a potential to be something more. That is how I got the idea of slightly folding the roof in the middle to make it look like it could fly if it wanted to. The hole I punched in one of the "wings" was to lessen the overall mass of the structure and to give it some character.


An ultra-distorted form study sketch.

The structural supports are organic in form again as an attempt to blend with the organic nature of the Sunken Garden. The inspiration for them is imagining two people holding up the roof on their backs ala-Atlas. I toyed with the idea of making the supports actual statues of two men but went ahead and abstracted them into two amorphous "X" figures to stay with the organic theme and partly because having two men hold up a giant wing looks "gay" =P.


My study of how it looks from the front. Ready to fly!

I imagine steps in front of the structure leading down onto the lower part of the Sunken Garden that can double as seats. These steps are basically just imbedded strips of concrete on the ground so that contouring the slope for them need not be drastic. Also, as strips, they have the ability to sink with the Sunken Garden.

The roofed portion of the structure in between the supports will have a gradually sloping floor with rows of seats. I imagine the seats to maybe be aluminum row seating. I don’t show the seats on the drawings here though in deference to the clarity of communicating the form of the structure.

What I designed is basically a straight up grandstand. I don’t believe in making it a stage as I personally believe that a stage is better situated at the back of the Main Library (designing this stage could be another design exercise). It can still be used as a waiting area of course.

I imagine flowerbeds flanking the structure on both sides to give the site color and to emphasize that the Sunken Garden is of course a "garden". I also thought it would be cool if you can see changes around the structure as the plants go through their cycles.


My study of the grandstand on site.

The hole in the "wing" inspired me to maybe have a tree through it. I thought it would be great if the structure made people think things like "how did they build the structure around the tree?".

Instead of a tree, flagpoles or a tall sculpture can also be put where the hole is at. The flagpoles would be functional and can give added character to the structure as flags or banners hang from them. The sculpture would again just be a cool thing as it would sort of give the sense that it is a sculpture within a sculpture. The sculptures can be changed from time to time too.

The possibilites are of course endless.

Another Crack at the U.P. Charter Change

The proposed new U.P. charter which seeks to exempt UP from the Salary Standardization Law (SSL) has been given new life as its possible approval is again being discussed in the Senate.

This exemption would give UP the ability to use its financial resources (or gains from various UP properties) to improve the the salaries of faculty and employees.

If you remember, this is the same proposed new U.P. charter that was obstructed by Senator John Osmena amidst a well publicized feud with U.P. President Francisco Namenzo. Osmena had even taken out full page newspaper ads to attack Nemenzo's character while Nemenzo himself crafted an open letter addressing the feud which was widely circulated through newspapers and the internet. (Click here to refresh your memory).

This time the proposed new U.P. charter does not seem like it will have a better chance to be passed with another senator seemingly hell bent on giving its proponents a hard time in the senate sessions. Again it is because of the senator's personal issues with U.P. personnel.

Here is an article from the Philippine Daily Inquirer that reported on this:

Santiago to UP law professors: I’m ‘physically dangerous’

Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago warned law professors at the University of the Philippines on Tuesday that she was “physically dangerous,” referring to her target shooting practice.

Santiago issued the warning at a Senate hearing on the proposed revisions on the UP charter in which the discussions had reminded her of her son, Alexander or AR, who committed suicide after he failed to enter the university from which his mother had graduated.

“The smallest movement in world politics and you’re talking a mouthful as if the Philippines were a world power,” Santiago said addressing professors of the state university.

“But faced with a moral issue, all they can do is to keep their silence in their graves,” an incensed Santiago said in the hearing, a portion of which was aired on GMA Network’s radio station dzBB.

Santiago’s son shot himself in November 2003 after he failed a subject on constitutional law at the Ateneo de Manila University.

He was also not accepted in UP where Santiago claimed its professors had asked him if she was crazy and if his father was hooked on cock fighting.

It was at this point that the lady senator issued the warning.

Senator Francis Pangilinan was not spared from Santiago’s temper, the report said.

Pangilinan noted in his speech that Santiago was his former professor at UP, the report added.

But Santiago berated Pangilinan, saying her teachings “did not show” on her former student, the report said.