A building that teaches
I’ve always been a fan of Ed Calma’s designs. Whether it’s a residence with stunning flying buttresses hugging a cliff and sparkling against the sea in Punta Fuego, or a restaurant whose design was inspired by the Japanese art of origami, or a pavilion that expresses the country’s voyages, his modern structures are always a joy to look at. Just imagine what it’s like to actually live, work or study in one of his buildings.
Once, on the way to an interview in
An Ed Calma design will always stop you dead in your tracks. That’s guaranteed.
So when La Salle-College of Saint Benilde invited us to tour their new School of Design and Arts (SDA) “campus” on Pablo Ocampo St. in Manila, we were expecting nothing short of a building that would stand out from the neighborhood.
And it does — for better (as the modernists will tell you) or for worse (as the traditionalists will tell you).
Designed by Lor Calma Design Inc., with Ed Calma as principal designer, the new
How Calma’s firm and Associates got the project is a story in itself. SDA invited architects and architectural firms to submit designs for the new building with the competition brief being that it should match
Ed being Ed, and his dad Lor Calma being Lor, and both being militant modernists, the firm submitted their idea of what the new SDA should look like: a modern building made of glass, steel and concrete, folding and jutting out against the Manila skyline with interior spaces that hardly have a straight line, a building that doesn’t require the use of electricity in the daytime, a tall structure that gives you a sense of space even when you’re right smack in the middle of a very dense city, spacious corridors that double as gallery spaces, design solutions that address the problems of tropical heat.
“I said if I was going to join the contest I would do it my own way,” Ed says. “I had nothing to lose anyway and they would choose anyone they wanted. So I made this scale model that I presented and a few diagrams of how the layout was going to be.”
An aside: Ed always builds scale models. That’s how Restaurant 12 got its unique look. The ceiling of the miniature collapsed and when Ed looked at it, he thought it was much more interesting that way and so he changed his design concept.
In a way, the
“I thought we would never win, then I got a call after three months, and they said the firm had won the competition.”
After Lor Calma Design Inc. won the project, Bro. Andrew called up Lor and told him that perhaps they could change the design to Neoclassical. It was a last-minute effort to change the direction, but the firm, known for its modern structures, wouldn’t budge. The only debate between Lor, his son and the architects in the firm was whether to make it really simple and rectilinear, or to pursue a very avant-garde design.
“We thought it was important to be forward-looking rather than to keep the look similar with existing buildings,” says Ed. “That’s what my dad told Bro. Andrew. It would have been great if Bro. Andrew saw the finished building.”
What convinced the board of judges to choose Ed was this: “His vision aligned with ours, which was that we wanted a building that teaches,” says Cecille Ravelas, SDA building administrator and the go-between for the school board, the contractors, architects, engineers and everyone involved in the construction. “We’re a design school, the campus cannot be just an empty space. It has to inspire and incite creativity, and the firm’s design was the most playful. When Ed was presenting their design he said, ‘This is a building that will teach creative minds.’ We knew right away that he was our guy.”
“We were looking for somebody who was also thinking out of the box. The chairman of the board is an artist himself and he’s really pushing the envelope all the time,” says Cecille. “It was divine intervention, a confluence of like-minded people.”
The only conventional thing in the new school is the bell. It rings loud and clear through the white, wide corridors, signaling the end or beginning of a class. Everything else is so novel that it doesn’t look like a school building at all.
“Every space is a design workspace,” says Ed. “The design is somewhat fractured to create these incredible spaces instead of the normal corridor or classroom. And this makes students think about spaces and makes them realize that there are many different types of spaces, from narrow to skewed, etc. Once you give that as a vocabulary, they have to deal with it in their own design.”
Even the furnishings of the school make the students think. You won’t find ordinary wood or plastic chairs here. Instead, you get pieces inspired by iconic designs such as the Panton chair by Verner Panton in the cafeteria which, by the way, looks like a restaurant in a modern museum.
“We wanted the school to have these so the students would learn and know the designers and how they do it,” he says.
Adds Cecille, “Of course, because of budget constraints, we do have generic furniture, which we show to Ed as well.”
Built on a 5,000-square-meter lot that used to be a parking lot, the 14-story school wasn’t an easy one to build, for sure. Cecille relates that during the three-year construction period, numerous complaints arose, chief of which was that the contractors, the engineers and others involved in the project — all of whom won their respective bids — found it “un-buildable,” “too difficult,” “too new,” “too complex,” “too experimental.”
“I get that all the time,” says Ed with a laugh.
But the school, being a design school, insisted that just because this was a complex project didn’t mean it was impossible to do.
After they had actually built it, what do Ed’s detractors say now? “Well, now you can see that they’re proud of being involved in it because they display the school on their websites,” says Cecille.
It does take a village to raise something and in this case, it took 12 architects and personnel from Lor Calma’s firm. Each architect was in charge of two floors, another for the exterior wall, another for the interior wall, then several more to coordinate with the electrical and mechanical firms.
“It took the whole office actually,” Ed says. “We wanted it to be an iconic building, so we focused the design on the façade. It’s not so complicated in a sense that we used just concrete flooring and plaster walls. I would have wanted to use aluminum for the walls and stone instead of concrete but of course there was a budget. They did have a hard time with the façade and ceiling.”
And the theater.
If you stand across the street and look at the building, you’d think SDA was a low, chunky structure. What you don’t see right away are 14 stories of glass and steel in the most interesting shape. The first thing that catches your eye is the elevated driveway pushed back to avoid clogging the street below and right above it is the cantilevered 558-seat theater, seemingly floating about 25 meters in the air.
“Being in a dense city where there are no campuses, I came up with the idea of having a vertical campus. You see a lot of ‘open air’ or ‘wasted’ areas inside, but they’re not actually wasted. All the corridors and common areas where students converge — they can be galleries for displaying students’ works, so those from other departments would see what everybody else is doing and they would eventually influence each other and hopefully create a richer design vocabulary and approach. That’s the essence of the planning of the building.”
Costing P1.45 billion to build, furnish and equip their laboratories with the latest computers and equipment for the different disciplines, Saint Benilde-School of Design and Arts offers 12 courses that range from Bachelor of Arts in Digital Filmmaking, to Multimedia Arts, Music Production, Photography, Technical Theater, Industrial Design, Dance, Interior Design, Fashion Design and Merchandising and Arts Management.
“I wanted to create a building that will actually express the way these different disciplines merge and influence each other,” says Ed. “It expresses a multi-disciplinary approach to teaching.”
“The whole idea is that the whole building is a museum, but now they don’t want to call it a museum because people associate museums with something lifeless,” says Cecille. Then she adds with a laugh: “One brother said, ‘Don’t call it a museum because they might think everybody was old here.’”
On the contrary, it’s a young, diverse community of students and teachers. Says Katherine Sarmiento, head of the marketing and communications office of SDA, “The faculty is composed of young professors because the programs the school offers are mostly new — or at least many of them started in the 1980s.” (Saint Benilde was founded in 1988.)
The school also takes pride in their library and resource center. “Most of our faculty members are industry practitioners. For many of them, their primary reason for working at Benilde is to have access to the library.”
As for the students’ reaction to the building, Ed says some students e-mail him. “”It’s mostly positive, but there are negative comments as well — perhaps from a disgruntled employee made to suffer to work on the building.”
Cecille adds, “We have feedback forms and in general everybody appreciates the work. You see students in one corner taking pictures or sketching, they’re so proud to have this building. But even among the students, there are the traditionalists who say it’s too white.”
One thing is certain though: It’s hard not to be inspired in a building like this. And it’s hard not to have an opinion about it.
That, in itself, is a learning experience.
