Audaciousness is one virtue the Filipino architect has mastered as a fish would walking. We are just too safe, too cautious. A few feeble attempts at boldness sadly even ends up as crass, largely due to the lack of understanding of the science of space, form and movement. Our training infrastructure makes us masters of hollow plagiarism. Very few designs walk out of our studios that captivate the imagination of the public. No engagement, no conversation between the habitat and the inhabitants.
.
We have even mutated into dullness by safely declaring that Filipino architecture is just but a spirit, and not of form. Worse, some even succumb into the darkness of just believing that it is non-existent. So now, we plant Buddha heads into our walls, grow acanthus leaves onto our columns, and dig the entire city of Venice into our sorry landscape. But wait, is that not audacity at work… I deviate.
.
I came across this building by Frank O. Gehry, a mighty controversial “star-chitect”, called The Fish. It is in Barcelona, Spain, standing as the portal or gateway to the 1992 summer Olympiad from the port area. Gehry is the same architect who planted the Guggenheim in the middle of sleepy and poor Bilbao. Had it not for this “monster”, you would never know this city more than the chorizos they make. It is now one of the jewels of the Vizcayan tourism program. Just bring an umbrella inside the museum to keep you dry on a rainy night. Hey, let them brilliant engineers think about where to bring the water to. Let us for the meantime float on our lofty artsy-fartsy architectural world.
.
“It was by accident that I got into the fish image. My colleagues were starting to replay Greek temples. Y’know in the post-modern thing, I don’t know, when was that… the 80s. That was hot, everybody was re-doing the past. I said, y’know, Greek temples are anthropomorphic. And three hundred million years before man was fish. If you wanna, if you gotta go back, if you’re insecure about going forward, dammit, go back three hundred million years. Why are you stopping at the Greeks? So I started drawing fish in my sketchbook. and then I started to realize that there was something in it.” - F. O. Gehry
.
.
The audacity.
