Exhibit A

Keith and I attended the opening of exhibit for the National Artists for Architecture at Museo Iloilo last May 28.

I was quite excited to see the exhibit as i have been diligently digging the goldmine that is pushpullbar (pushpullbar.com) for more than a couple of months now. The thought of this exhibit set off the excite button in my head: Filipino architect hero post. In pushpullbar. Which I'll coerce Keith to do because I don't think I'll manage (meaning I lack credibility?).

I have always admired the Museo Iloilo. It is probably one of the first (and true) modern buildings in Iloilo City. The architect, I heard was a big fan of Neimeyer, and named his son Oscar. Designed to conform and use nature to its advantage its door opened to a mini amphitheater, landscaped with mini-rolling hills and mini-rinks that both board and inline skaters loved. Large canopied fire trees provided shade to the grounds and cooled the air that enters the Museo. When the firetrees bloom in summer, the Museo looks like a building on fire, postcard perfect. Few years back, that amphitheater was demolished to give way to a parking space. The landscape drastically changed following the construction of the Iloilo Provincial Capitol. During the construction of the Capitol, rumors about the Museo being on the list of structures to be demolished circulated and we could only hope the people concerned reconsidered their decisions. One firetree after another also gave way to disease and eventual deterioration, the last, fallen by a tropical storm.

The Museo still stands today though multi-colored (it used to be just white), dwarfed by the 8-storey Iloilo Capitol. It used to look so proud and inviting with the firetrees abound. The former site of the amphitheater was not as bad, good thing they planted trees but it could be better.

Urbanists would have loved the Museo grounds since it was not gated and it was blanketed in grass. Open-air concerts used to be held there sans the very cumbersome set up of monobloc chairs, now a pre-requisite in the concrete Capitol parking lot. There's a new but very inferior stage (also in a rather awkward orientation) to replace the old amphitheater. I have never attended any concert there for more than 5 years now.

The exhibit opened late but it is not something I don't expect. After all, it is a tradition, if not an SOP, for dignitaries and special guests to arrive late. The program was however, forced to start when it started to drizzle.

I imagined the exhibit to be like browsing through the Architecture Travel forum in pushpullbar where you learn about architecture/buildings textbook-wise and, at the same time, get the feel of it from the point of view of the poster. The pushpullbar forum requires all posters to provide background about the building/architecture featured so readers won't be lost as to what is being featured in the post. Some posters would quote a page off wikipedia (properly acknowledged of course) but because people from this site are so good, they would, more often than not, add a trivia or two, a stock knowledge here and there and the background information becomes a very interesting read. Posters are also required to provide other details such as the address, opening hours, contact details, a KMZ file of the building (and if the poster isn't able to do so, pushpullbar has its own "specialist" to do that, how convenient!). The most interesting chapters in the posts are the photos. They don't even need to be Architectural Digest material type of photos. Posters here make it a point that the photo documentation would be close, if not equivalent, to their own personal experience while visiting the building. Alongside the photos which the poster took, s/he would oftentimes discuss his/her own impression of the architecture and compare what the books said and what his own senses now tell him, standing in front of this...thing. Reading through the posts is like being inside a gallery.

I'm not saying that this should be done by everyone who wants to document a building but believe me, reading about architects being chased by bouncer type security is enough to debunk the black-turtle-neck-le-corbusier-glasses-wearing-scholarly-looking myth on architects. And these things, these pieces of trivia (but not trivial information), these field notes, made the building more "human" to me, a non-architect. And I suppose this is what the exhibit wanted to do, also. Only that it failed.

What made it fail, really? Well, let us see.

First is that we didn't get to see architecture travel type of posts. But I should be entirely blamed for that – for the very high expectations. What we found were blown-up pages from what seemed to be an annual report/national artists brochure: black and white posters with low-res photographs of an angle/corner of the building, watermarked with things I can't recall.

Second, some printed posters were described using the same captions. Yes, poster #1 or Featured Architect A had the same caption as the three other succeeding posters and this to me made it a total FAIL. Imagine a Davies brochure given out during product presentation. That's how the whole thing looked to me.

I am disappointed by the exhibit. I don't think the exhibit was inspiring enough to make architecture enthusiasts want to grab a book and read about the architects featured in the exhibit. Most of them would probably forget about it the moment they step out of the museum and I don't think that is a good sign. After all, they have had their pictures taken beside those posters, in the very small museum gallery that for a good minute or so suddenly turned into one humid photo studio.

I cringed.

It doesn't really make me wonder now why so many people think the houses in Savannah are good architecture. But you architects should. You should.