Legitimate architecture
Last Tuesday was my TV debut as a host, albeit a substitute one. I stood in for Manolo Quezon on his popular ANC show The Explainer. The show’s executive producer, who happens to be my better half, figured it was time for my shot at 15 minutes of fame. I figured there was nothing to it but found out that I am probably better read than heard or seen, or until I get used to a teleprompter. I do much better in front of large live audiences preaching the salvation that good architecture and design can bring us.
This leads us to this week’s subject, which was the issue “explained” on the show that night — “License to Design: The Practice of Architecture in the
Next week is Architecture Week and despite over a hundred years of the profession of architecture’s development and the current real estate construction boom, Filipino architects and designers in related fields like planning, landscape architecture and interior design have little to celebrate. The practice of these professions here is threatened to extinction by the continued bias of clients against them, the threat of illegal Filipino practitioners, the invasion of foreign consultants and the exodus of Filipino designers to better-paying jobs overseas.
Helping me explain these issues on the show were two architects — Armando Alli of the Board of Architecture at the Professional Regulation Commission, and Dean Danilo Silvestre of the
Both are also practicing (registered and licensed) architects and environmental planners.
The bias against local practitioners apparently stems from the public’s misunderstanding of what architects and related design professionals do. Architecture is the art and science of designing buildings and building complexes to house and support the functions of clients and the public. As a service, it is like medicine and law where problems or needs are addressed in a timely and direct manner but with the additional facet of elegance, aesthetics and good taste.
Many Filipino architects are treated like suppliers or contractors, valued only if fees charged are cheap and if they are willing to be constantly on call (unlike doctors or lawyers, clients refuse to pay architects based on time spent at endless meetings). It’s a matter of respect, which makes it all the more aggravating for many locals practitioners as they witness a whole different attitude given by clients to foreign-schooled but unregistered or licensed practitioners or foreign consultants.
Of late, a number of Filipino or Fil-American designers schooled or who have worked overseas have set up practices without the necessary licenses. Their success has been the product of good marketing skills, individual packaging (foreign accents, fashionable dress sense, and conspicuous attendance in the cocktail circuit) as well as a competent portfolio of work overseas. It is no wonder then that local media find these personalities good copy.
Nevertheless they have been found not to be in the roster of registered or licensed architects. The United Architects of the Philippines (UAP) has sent notices to editors in chief and writers of design magazines and broadsheets to desist from referring to these designers as “architects.”
Similar incidents have been cited by the Philippine Association of Landscape Architects and the Philippine Institute of Interior Designers regarding personalities featured in newspapers and magazines and referred to as landscape architects or interior designers.
All three professions are regulated by the government and require registration and licenses to practice. On the show, architect Alli explained that the Architecture Law RA9266 (there are similar ones for landscape architecture, interior design and environmental planning) protects the interest of the public and ensures legal accountability for malpractice or its results — collapsing buildings, landslides in housing sites, exploding utilities and the like.
More worrying for the UAP, PALA and PIID is the proliferation of foreign designers who are featured in numerous press releases and ads by real estate developers — complete with portraits and interviews as to how they have designed this or that new masterplanned community, world-class complexes or trend-setting landscapes and urban design.
Alli explained that there are several requisites for foreigners to practice — proof that they offer expertise no Filipino professional can offer, reciprocity from the country they come from (meaning Filipinos could practice there), a permit from the PRC and a permit from the Department of Labor and Employment. It has been discovered that not one foreign consultant or firm has ever been given these permits. No country has reciprocity rights with the
Dean Silvestre for his part explained the effects of globalization on the educational system and the pressures on students that reflect in different directions they take — moving abroad versus establishing experience and practice in the
My view, as I stated in the show is that “No one questions the necessity of regulating the practice of medicine or law. Local lawyers and doctors would raise hell if any foreign firm dares set up a local practice. No patient or client would go to these firms anyway unless they knew that these practitioners were licensed and liable under local law.”
The situation with architecture is a bit different but malpractice in the art and science of designing buildings could lead, like bad medicine or lawyering, to loss of life or a sad existence in a structure that looks and feels like a prison.
Filipino architects are considered world-class in every country except their own. Like many in other design professions they are driven overseas because they are unappreciated and underpaid yet they possess the technical expertise and capacity that could create all that public and private clients are planning to build in support of a booming economy …without the recourse of foreign consultants.
Architecture is a proud profession. Its practitioners have to be respected for them to be able to produce structures and settings that engender pride of place and a national identity. Philippine architecture is best created by Filipinos for Filipinos. If we aspire instead to live in simulations of other lands and cultures, then globalization will have shown its ugliest façade, an illusion of modernity that hides behind it a poverty of culture and purpose we can never escape from.
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More next week on the subject of architecture as we celebrate Architecture Week.
Feedback is welcome. E-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com
