The revolutionary designers of Batulao Artscapes
MANILA, Philippines — When nature is your canvas, there is that extra responsibility to design and build with respect. The designer must treat the terrain with care and utmost respect — but what about the needs of future residents? Designers must also provide them beautiful living spaces that meet their needs. And the challenge for the developer is to build a community that will enrich their lives, both spiritually and intellectually.
Such is the responsibility that falls on the shoulders of what Revolution Precrafted calls its “revolutionary” designers — architects and designers that have made a name for themselves with their extraordinary portfolios.
Eduardo Calma
Calma is a multi-awarded architect known for designing luxurious homes in upscale communities in the Philippines. Three of his buildings — The Mind Museum, College of Saint Benilde School of Design, and the UP Manila Museum of A History of Ideas — were among the 20 designs nominated for the Haligi ng Dangal awards by the National Commission on Culture and the Arts.
For Batulao, Calma designed Polygonal Successions, townhouses in which the linear organization produces repetitive faceted forms to create a larger architectural texture on the landscape, much like repetitive patterns of leaves in plants.
Kenneth Cobonpue
A multi-awarded furniture designer and manufacturer, Cobonpue integrates nature, traditional craft and innovative technologies in his design. He has earned international awards and recognition for his creative, organic and expressive pieces used by private residences and hotels around the world.
Cobonpue designed the Hedera Home for Batulao — open, minimalist spaces in the interior that foster serenity and leisure, while the exterior’s foliage cools the building and purifies the air as evergreen shrouds the walls.
Jean Nouvel Design
A multidisciplinary team working in the fields of furniture design, interior design, scenography, and visual communications, Jean Nouvel’s œuvre follows the tradition of philosopher architects who design whole worlds of all dimensions. In 2008, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honour, for his work on more than 200 projects.
The firm’s design of the Revolution Museum of Visual Arts is a modular system, that is highly configurable and adapts to the requirements of the program. The Main Bloc can have multiple, interchangeable attachments depending on the need, each of which has its unique structural design—the Vault, the Shed, and the Gable, all play a part in creating a inimitable design configuration.
Budji+Royal Architecture Design
Budji Layug and Royal Pineda are known for distinct, responsive design and practical construction using various sustainable, energy-efficient materials and innovative technologies.
They designed two houses for Batulao: Facet and Tranche. Facet allows the homeowner numerous configuration possibilities through the use of practical and functional design attachments, while Tranche grows and expands in tranches as it takes into account the evolution of one’s lifestyle.
Daphne Guinness
Guinness dabbles in various artistic pursuits such as fashion, music, film, and even perfumery, working with brands like Comme des Garçons.
Her Daphne Skin House’s façade is composed of a series of fixed and collapsible metal panels — in front of doors and windows — giving the house two unique facets: the closed and the open facades.
Marcel Wanders
Wanders is a product and interior designer, as well as an art director who achieved international recognition with his iconic Knotted Chair in 1996.
His Eden House makes generous use of glass while its roof extends over the exterior to connect the inside and outside spaces and create twice the living area for special private and social gatherings.
AFGH for Wallpaper*
Wallpaper* is the world’s most important design and style magazine. It collaborates with artists, designers, and architects like AFGH.
Its We Home is raised slightly off the ground, making it adaptive to any topography. The system is vertically scalable, depending on the number of floors each unit can be between 45-180 sqm.
Studio Libeskind Design
Studio Libeskind Design is Milan-based with projects around the world, including two villas and a modular condo-hotel designed for Revolution Precrafted.
Adaptation II’s form is based on a mathematical unfolding of irregular angles around a rectangular core, allowing it to adapt to just about any site. It is also adaptable to different types of people, desires, and lifestyles–as a bachelor’s pad or a family home.
David Salle and AA Studio
David Salle is one of the most important figures to define postmodern sensibility, while AA Studio specializes in projects that balance form and function with a bold, yet elegant flair.
Their Billboard Home’s entire exterior wall is an image drawn from a “palette” of painting fragments, which are digitally printed on the metal cladding of the two solid end walls, creating startling imagistic interventions in the otherwise predominantly horizontal landscape.
Elizabeth de Portzamparc
Elizabeth de Portzamparc is a French-Brazilian architect, urbanist and designer who works in Paris.
Her Butterfly Home reflects flexibility, modularity, lightness and movement, all of which are introduced in this project through inclined shapes.
Philip Johnson Alan Ritchie Architects
The firm’s philosophy is founded on the belief that understanding the client’s desires, needs and goals is an essential first step in generating designs that are functionally and aesthetically successful.
The Modular Glass House was inspired by Philip Johnson’s original but has been re-imagined as a series of modular components that can be pre-crafted and shipped to any site.
In addition, the firm will design the Revolution Museum of Art and Technology in Batulao Artscapes. Based on sixty-foot cube that is bisected into two sections or modules to create a strong geometric statement, its main feature will be a 45-degree sloping roof plane which will make a striking statement from both inside and out. Through the use of translucent panels, sunlight will filter through to the exhibit area below, and at a night, a soft glow from the technology installations inside will emanate through the roof.
Marmol Radziner for Architeture Interiors by Kravitz Design
Kravitz Design was founded by music icon Lenny Kravitz. Marmol Radziner creates projects that engage the surrounding environment and take a warm, textured approach to modernism.
His Instrumental Home is a free-standing enclosure that includes a living area, kitchen, one bedroom and one bathroom. The materials are an elegant palette of metal panels, wood flooring and aluminum doors and windows.
Tange Associates
The history of Tange Associates began with the founding of Kenzo Tange Studios in 1946. One of the studio’s first projects was the design of the Hiroshima Peace Park, to commemorate the rise of a new era of peace.
The firm’s take on the Revolution Museum of Performing Arts is inspired by the Itsukushima shrine in Miyajima, Japan. The warm and welcoming champagne gold aluminum panels and the light tearing through the pavilion enclosure, attracts passersby but also contrasts the heftiness of the paneling and concrete surface. The Museum is floating and mobile, but also robust and bold.
Christian de Portzamparc
The first French architect to be awarded the highest distinction in architecture, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the Pritzker Prize, at the age of 50. The towers created by Christian de Portzamparc is the result of his research on the verticality and sculptural dimension, crystallized around the characteristics of prismatic shapes. The most widely recognized example is the LVMH Tower in New York, United States, followed by competition for the Hearst Tower in 2000, soon accompanied by the tower residential 400 Park Avenue in Manhattan, New York.
His design for the Revolution Museum of Design and Architecture is a building composed of various elements that can be positioned differently to adapt perfectly to the site and the program. It is entirely composed of 3 different typologies of module. The material finishes change depending on the use of its programmatic attribution.
