Jason Buensalido & his crusade to contemporize Filipino architecture

I should start this story with a full disclosure: I am a biased writer when it comes to this subject. Of the many stories I have written related to design, he is the only architect that I actually worked with on a project.

I first met Jason Buensalido 14 years ago, when he was 19 years old, an architecture student at the University of Santo Tomas. I was covering design stories for this section and I interviewed him because his student team won the redesign contest for Nayong Pilipino over established architectural firms.

At 19, he talked like an old man.

His ideas about how architecture should respond to our culture were fully formed even then. He articulated his thoughts about Filipino and contemporary global design as if he was an octogenarian National Artist for Architecture looking back at a life’s work. In reality, he wasn’t. He was just about to start his.  

Years later, after he topped the architecture board exam and had established his own firm but “was still looking for the firm’s identity,” I told him about a renovation project after a well-known architect whose advice I sought told me, “Just change the floors and hire a contractor.”

The house in the south  sat for months un-renovated (because of long negotiations for loans and mortgage), and unlivable (because I hated how it looked). The only thing I liked about it was that it had an indoor courtyard, but the problem with the courtyard was that it had a stone pond and — I kid you not! —  pink flamingos made of concrete. It was old, it was dark, it was tacky (the closet doors were covered in peeling wallpaper and the kitchen was painted peach — I’m not a peach kind of girl).

I thought of Jason and asked his mother Joy Buensalido, whom I first met working for a magazine and became friends with through the course of covering her PR events for this section, “While he’s just starting, he’s still cheap, right?”

But Jason, who topped the architecture board exam two years after we did our first interview, was never cheap. He was like one of those artists that sprung fully formed from God knows where. Think of a child that went walking straight through and skipped the whole crawling stage. He was a top designer even as a student.

Jason said, “No, no, what you were told is wrong. You do need an architect because he will be the one to protect you from a contractor doing a sub-standard job.” And then he added, “I will treat you as if you were family.”  

In terms of budget, I wasn’t the ideal client for a young firm to take, but the project was. Jason personally considered it a challenge that he wanted to take on.  

For almost a year in 2009 to 2010, I saw Jason every Tuesday at 8 a.m. as he transformed ‘70s style into modern. I was living on the opposite side of Metro Manila, in Quezon City, where a drive through rush hour traffic on EDSA to the south was a good two hours  even if it was only 36 kilometers in between.

And that’s how we became like family.

What was going to be a renovation turned out to be a full-scale rebuilt. Walls were knocked down and would never come up again to divide the space. Doors were moved. Iron grills were sawed off. An indoor brick barbecue and a bar were removed. The parquet floor was replaced with beech flooring, red tiles were replaced with black ones. Glass was installed, cutouts were made in ceiling for recessed lighting, and then it was filled with skylights.

He called it the “Courtyard House,” and it would turn out to be one of the first residential projects he would design.

What Jason was building in this neighborhood that had mostly old houses was a black-and-white space without walls except for the bedroom.   When Metro Home & Entertaining came to shoot, editor Katrina Polotan-Lirio said, “This is probably the most openly planned house we have ever seen.” Same thing with the Tropical Houses team of Bobby Caballero and designer Leo Almeria. It’s not very big but the openness of the space made it look a lot more than it really is.

Those days of arguing with Jason about materials, color and cutting costs (he had expensive taste but he always gave cheaper alternatives. “Seriously, Jason, why do door handles cost this much, why?”) are several years behind now.

He got married in 2011 to Nikki Boncan, a gorgeous interior designer with a doll face who literally added color to his architectural palette and to his life. (He now wears colored pants, he says, even orange and green compared to his strictly black and white wardrobe before).

With Nikki, Buensalido & Architects has been transformed. So has Jason — in ways only a woman could do, one who is as much an equal partner in his firm as she is in his life.   

Nikki is the enabler, she nagged Jason till he finally put his thoughts down on paper — and eventually a book that he launched recently called Random Responses: A Crusade to Contemporize Philippine Architecture.

Something strange happened to Philippine architecture in the 1980s to the 2000s. It got stuck in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It stopped being  as progressive as it once was; it didn’t, as they would say, get with the program. 

Instead, it began looking elsewhere — to Bali, the Mediterranean, Switzerland, America, Thailand, Italy and France. It seemed like all these large-scale developments were drawing inspiration from everywhere but here.

Jason Buensalido, meanwhile, was putting up his firm Buensalido & Architects in 2006. “It was an identity-finding process,  just like when you start anything,” he says. “We found out we were happy doing contemporary and progressive projects. We started to decline themed projects, like if someone wanted a Greek house. We didn’t want to just copy and then stamp it here.”

It didn’t matter if they were big projects because the firm “realized that the only true architecture is responsive architecture, one that responds to the climate, the culture, the budget and taste of the client. We believe that architecture and design are simply a response to context. The first thing we need to do with every project is to really understand the context.

“That’s when I sort of zeroed in also on trying to contemporize Filipino architecture. If you look at the history of Filipino architecture, it started with the bahay kubo, then the Spanish came and colonized us, and they simply contemporized the style, coming up with the bahay na bato. It was the exact same plan and design but modernized according to the available materials here at the time — that’s why you see the adobe stone on the ground floor. They lifted the house to be on the second floor and raised it with stilts. Before, what was below was the babuyan and now it became a storage for carozas.

“It had an open plan to encourage interaction because we’re very family-oriented, so the rooms simply flow into each other, responding to the culture of Filipinos. And then in the 1900s, there was the Chicago World Expo, wherein Daniel Burnham said, the Greek and Roman are already the perfect kind of architecture, why reinvent it? That’s why when he came to plan the cities of Manila and Baguio, he enforced the Neocolonial Greek and Roman architecture, which was also very American in terms of government buildings. If you look at our institutional  buildings that were built at the time, they don’t respond to our climate, there are no canopies that protect them from heat and rain, and yet in the Philippines sometimes the rain is horizontal, not just vertical.”

Jason points out that there were always the architects who studied abroad and brought home global sensibilities but still created responsive structures, especially in the 1960s when architects were reinterpreting traditional design using new materials and forms. “You had Carlo D. Arguelles, whose Philamlife Building on UN, which is about to be demolished, is still one of the most contemporary structures until now. We had the champions like Leandro Locsin and Bobby Mañosa.”    

That’s what he’s been trying to bring back with his projects. Now eight years old, Buensalido & Architects’ portfolio ranges from residential to commercial and large-scale developments; the budgets also go from modest to sky-high.

These projects are featured in his book Random Responses, a compendium of past, future, built, unbuilt projects. The book features over 150 designs in rendered images and blueprints, capturing the design principle that values process to produce works that are modern and innovative.

“Writing it was harder than designing it,” Jason says. “I had to avoid architectural jargon because we don’t want only architects to read it, but everybody —  anybody who’s interested in home design and Filipino culture. I tried to make it easily digestible, that’s why even the size is like that (8x8”), you can even bring it to the john. We want Random Responses to instigate a paradigm shift, so that Filipinos will learn to fight for an architectural identity we can truly see as our own.”

It’s an identity that is far from just being decorative (like putting sawali on a modern structure) or a replica of traditional houses. “Those are superficial interpretations of  Filipino architecture,” he says. 

“What we tried to do was first to understand the psyche of the Filipino culture and we came up with four points: Optimism, personalization and participation, weaving, and vernacular models.”

Jason says on optimism: “We understand the fact that we are one of the happiest people in the world, we have a fiesta every single day happening in different parts of the Philippines, and in the middle of natural disasters we can still conjure up a smile. We are very optimistic, we always believe there’s a brighter future. That’s why our people like vibrant spaces, spaces that are uplifting (his and Nikki’s home is very colorful and has elements of banderitas) and this comes from quality space as well. If you think about space, it’s typically a cube but if you allow light to penetrate it, if you paint it, the space is automatically changed.”

On personalizing space: “Look at the jeepneys — they’re all made of the same stainless steel bodies but no two jeepneys are alike. The drivers get to reflect their personalities through the borloloys; tricycles are the same.  But if you go into a real estate development, the homeowners lose their identities in the middle of these cookie-cutter houses because they’re all the same. And yet there is a way to personalize a development — in a controlled manner of course — and it’s by homeowners being able to select a color scheme on their own.”

On weaving: “Literally and metaphorically, we are a weaving culture. Our identities are woven from different cultures. Weaving is also present in tangible culture, from the banig to the vinta, salakot and barong tagalog. That’s why nagtataka ako why are we looking at foreign influences when our distinctiveness — our weaving — is something we can be proud of. Kenneth Cobonpue and Ito Kish are able to bring this into their furniture. Why can’t we do it in our architecture — we did it three decades ago. Our own architecture is timeless because it is who we are.”

On vernacular, responsive models: “It’s bringing Filipino-ness into our structures and our world. No. 1 is sustainability, the bahay kubo has always been the most sustainable vernacular model in terms of architecture because it’s well ventilated, it has lots of natural light, it had a very compact living space. If you think about it, our idea of a single unit is the family, as compared to Europeans whose idea of a single unit is themselves. Foreigners cannot understand our multi-generational living.”

One of his most responsive designs to our climate is the Project Smart Home, where Jason and his firm were challenged to build five “smart” townhouses for ANC’s Philippine Reality TV. The site is Marikina, where typhoon Ondoy hit the hardest in 2009, making millions homeless in a day’s rainfall, and stranding people on their rooftops for days.

In this context, Jason took “smart” to mean a climate-adaptive house. “We lifted the house on stilts just like a bahay kubo. The living room where most of your appliances are is on the third floor, bedrooms are on the second floor so if the floods reach the second floor, it’s just your bed that’s damaged.

“With the view that another typhoon and flooding like Ondoy will happen again, we developed rafts or regenerative amphibious floating terraces, which are actually balconies that can be detached and you can row yourself to the nearest evacuation center. It also acts as a bris-soleil (or sunscreen) to reduce the heat coming into the house.”

This is perhaps the best example of why Jason insists on responsive architecture.

“We try not to be too literal with our structures. You won’t think they’re very Filipino because they’re progressive and contemporary, but the principles behind it are what make the design Filipino.”

And even then, he considers architecture to be the mother of all arts because it is the most widespread — we need not go into an art gallery, we are surrounded by it. “But still, there has to be some room for interpretation and abstraction.”

And meaning.

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Random Responses: A Crusade to Contemporize Filipino Architecture is available for purchase through email at design@buensalidoarchitects.com. For inquiries, call 478-3445. The book will be available at bookstores beginning first quarter of 2015.  

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