Table of contents for Volume 2 in BluPrint

Molteni & C made a prominent exhibition at the Salone del Mobile 2019 in Milan with several new pieces in collaboration with different well-known designers, including Shanghai-based design studio Neri and Hu. The Twelve AM Collection, marking the first project between the two, features a furniture system for the bedroom. The bed is simple; polished wood frame, thin steel legs, and a curved headboard which props up the cushion upholstered in either fabric or leather. More than its dainty and oriental design, the bed is accessorized with hooked side tables and a shelf or desk attachment at the back—turning it into a multifunctional hub. It also comes with a bench that can be equipped at the foot of the bed for additional seating while there is another separate, tall-backed valet…

We’ve been working for over 20 years now with foreign architects, and many don’t stick around for design development. They just deliver the architectural design and tell the project team to figure out the engineering. When it gets constructed, it’s way off the original concept because the approved concept did not include engineering. You can’t blame the foreign architects because, often, the concept is all the client asks for. So now we get the architectural concept, bring in the engineering concept, marry the two, and the result is a diluted version of the original concept. Working with SOM was very different. It was a dream exposure. At the kick-off meeting, there were two of us from Villarosa Architects; two from the structural engineer, SySquared; one electrical engineer, one mechanical engineer,…

On a wedge-shaped lot tucked away in a private subdivision in Alabang, an unassuming monotone façade faces a cul-de-sac beside oh-so-typical suburban homes with pitched roofs wearing molded steel eaves. This is a house whose homeowners have decided to not keep up with the Joneses, and whose designers have, instead, opted to strip back the Lim Residence’s form to one of abstraction. The Lims were bold in their appointment of Arkisens, who leaned towards a deconstructed modernism in their approach, but this was not unfamiliar territory for them. After working in Milan, Italy, for several years, the entrepreneurial couple set out to help their fellow OFWs return to their homeland without the shackles of insecure employment and income. The Lims call their advocacy, the ‘FRICH (free and rich) Revolution,’ a…

The promise of a grade 1A, Olympic-rated sports facility in the country was made to our national athletes decades ago, back in the day of Lydia de Vega, Asia’s fastest woman in the 1980s. Finally, it appears the promise will be fulfilled in time for the 30th Southeast Asian Games (SEA Games), the fourth that the Philippines is hosting. What comes as a surprise to many is that the five-billion-peso New Clark City Sports Complex will be turned over two months ahead of the original date in October. The early turnover gives the Philippine hosts three full months to test and prep the facilities before the biennial regional multi-sport event takes place from November 30 to December 10. In a nation where the construction of national monuments and government projects…

01/North Luzon Expressway Harbor Link Project Segment 10, a 5.58-kilometer, six-lane elevated expressway connecting McArthur Highway in Valenzuela City and C-3 in Caloocan City, which is expected to shorten travel time from 1 hour to 11 minutes. Completion within 2019. 02/Luzon Spine Expressway Network, a 1,040-kilometer expressway network which would connect the northern and southernmost parts of Luzon. By building a total of 18 expressways with a total road length of 655 kilometers, Villar aims to complement the existing expressway network spanning 385 kilometers. Once completed, the travel time from Metro Manila to San Fernando, La Union, will be reduced from almost 7 hours to 3 hours and 10 minutes. Moreover, travel time from La Union to Bicol will be reduced from nearly 20 hours to a little over 8.…

Along a busy and dusty road in the City of Mandaue, guarded gates open to the manicured, but largely utilitarian campus of the Sacred Heart School-Ateneo de Cebu, formerly the Sacred Heart School for Boys. The sprawling campus is a new one, a response to the robust growth in population after going coeducational in the year 2000. In 2014, seven years after the school first transferred address, all the academic spaces in the new campus were completed. The Board of Directors turned their attention, finally, to the erection of the school chapel. The campus master plan dictated the location of the campus jewel at a very exposed vantage point, directly across the school’s grand lobby. The site is a coveted lush patch of green, dotted with elder mango trees, in…

By 2013, the couple found themselves back in their homeland, thoroughly inspired and reinvigorated by the possibilities the burgeoning local scene offered. It was time to start from scratch. From zero. O. A click on the studio philosophy tab of Kientruc O’s website leads the viewer to a white page with a brush-painted O at the center. A look at the firm’s amazing body of work, often featured in popular architecture websites, yielded no answers and only bred tenuous theories. So when BluPrint journeyed to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, back in 2017, we strove to get to the bottom of the mystery once and for all. Soft-spoken studio principal and co-founder Đàm Vũ greeted us with a serene smile. Monk-like in his black, long sleeved shirt and shaven head,…

Like its neighbors, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Philippine International Convention Center, and the Philippine Plaza Hotel, the Manila Film Center was an imposing piece of Brutalism, projecting power and esteem. With its severe lines and weighty appearance, the theater was one of the Marcos administration’s many endeavors to establish that the Philippines, too, could be a cultural powerhouse. Pomp and circumstance was the name of the game, and the Manila Film Center aced that game, hosting the first of only two iterations of the ambitiously conceived Manila International Film Festival, intended to rival that of Cannes. The Manila Film Center was designed by architect Froilan Hong, a Brutalist version of the Parthenon. The project was conceptualized by Ramon Ignacio, the senior technology officer at the Technology Resource…

Written by Judith Arellano Torres Bright orange pillars thrust up from out of the concrete foundation, tantalizing the eye with their scale, precision, and power. They look like giant orange T-square rulers holding aloft a huge, oval bowl of ridged concrete. It is a picture of surprising monumentality, not because of the stadium’s height—19.35 meters or a mere five-story building—but because of the expanse of its 25,000-square-meter footprint. The Stadium’s color palette of orange, charcoal gray, ash gray, and black was inspired by the fury with which Mount Pinatubo announced its existence to the world three decades ago when magma burst through its jungle-covered dome and ejected a column of ash 34 kilometers into the atmosphere. The volcano’s 1991 eruption forever changed the landscape of thousands of square kilometers of farmland,…

From an average annual spend of 2.6% of the country’s GDP in the last six administrations, Year 1 (2017) of President Rodrigo Duterte’s Build, Build, Build program saw 6.3% of the GDP allocated to infrastructure building. The Department of Budget calculates the program will spend 7% of the GDP and an average annual budget of one trillion pesos by the end of Duterte’s term in 2022. The man in charge of the Build Build Build program is DPWH Secretary, 40-year-old Mark Aguilar Villar, son of former Senate President Manny Villar and incumbent Senator Cynthia Villar. When the DPWH asked BluPrint about advertising and promoting the program’s achievements, we invited the Secretary to be interviewed instead by two hard-nosed environment and urban management planners. The first is the Executive Director of…

Business in the front Upon arriving at the expansive entry court, a narrow, north-facing façade greets the visitor, somber and almost foreboding in form and color palette, with copious blacks and earth tones set on angular planes and forms. Of note are the generous five-meter eaves of the roof and entryway, decidedly Wrightian in profile as they loom over the visitor. A solitary frangipani tree in bloom to the left of the house’s dark-stained wood door softens the rigidity of the composition. Its sculptural counterpoint on the right, a portly man luxuriating weightlessly on a cloud, presages the playful spectacle that awaited the team inside. Pushing through the slatted door panels, one isn’t led indoors just yet but to an outdoor foyer. It serves as the perfect viewpoint from which…

Written by Denny Mata and Judith Torres “I like the approach of Royal and Budji because they used an aesthetic that they describe with the word—it’s a very nice word—honesty.” As the curator for three World Expo Philippine pavilions that won two gold medals and an honorable mention citation, Marian Pastor Roces was in a unique position to judge proposals for the Philippine pavilion at the World Expo 2020 Dubai. The stakes for Expo 2020 are high because this is the first time in decades the Philippines is building a structure instead of exhibiting inside an existing building. At the insistence of the Dubai organizers, the Philippines is building on a 3100-square-meter lot instead of the 900-square-meter plot the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) had originally reserved. The reason the…