house musings

Also, this one.

Studio Tacloban.
Photo by Ronnie Ramirez from the Domus site, here.

this one is not actually a house. it's a studio built by Scandinavian architecture and planning students/interns.

To quote the news report from the site Project Tacloban:

"Architecture students Ivar Tutturen, Trond Hegvold and Alexander E. Furunes have initiated and built a study centre in Tacloban, the Philippines, in collaboration with NGO Streetlight and the local community. Completed in summer 2011, the study centre serves children in the seawall slum community of the city of Tacloban, and was built by the architects and local families."

I was very much impressed by these people. The fact that they are interns are able to set up a studio and work in places you'd not even find in the map is just simply amazing. I'm a little jealous.

My art teacher and friend will be done with his studio before the year ends. Since the studio was formally drawn on paper at the time my husband and I (if it's still not obvious, we are art classmates, just as we were urban planning classmates years ago, proof enough that we are THAT inseparable) we're at the peak of our apprenticeship under Art Teacher. Art Teacher invites husband to brainstorm and has been given free access to poke his head at the site once in a while, just to check on the  construction details. So this Studio Practice is "our" work in progress, on a physical, educational, theoretical level. We're expecting societally (it's a word yes, click on it to see the link to meriam-webster) we'll make relevant progress. i'd like to believe that's the ultimate goal of our project.

Anyhow. what i meant to say here is that when i first saw the Workshop Project (Studio Tacloban), i thought "this could very well be a house for working class families like ours." It's impossible.
I know. It's too cheap and made of many lights materials ,too radical to even be considered by close-minded developers as a house fit for a subdivision.



FIN.

house

August 2012 marked our 6th year in the rented apartment.

Living in rental houses is not a very common set-up in a typical Filipino family. more often than not, parents who work in the City would leave their children to wherever they permanently reside and rent a bedspace (or a cheaper, smaller apartment that might not be very accommodating to little children) to save on bills. I am used to the rental set-up. I've been living in rented houses/spaces since i started high school (7th grade). My husband and I wanted to stay in the community for the convenience of everything -- it's near the farmer's/public market, near a grocery store, near a laundry shop, near a mall, near a highway going to the airport, near the studio of my art teacher, near the yoga center. It's also one ride away from my gynecologist, my kid's school, my work, my alma mater. Plus, there's a volkswagen restorer in the neighborhood (specialty: the beetle). It's also less than 500 meters to another university that has a medium-sized football field where i used to do my runs.
the location is almost perfect.
but then the house is almost run-down. it's unsafe and we've been victimized by termites several times. plus it's too small to contain my mother's goods. it will get even smaller as the kids grow bigger, and as our book collection continuously expands.                                                        

we've found a handful of subdivisions (which roughly translates to: private housing in suburban areas, no , not projects) with affordable lots but we've been endlessly successful in making a purchase because of countless reasons, primary to which is the lack of (what else) a large sum of money for downpayment (although every one, including my father, if confronted by this problem, would always say that we have enough property to offset that need--but i dunno how true is that in my part).

Secondly, subdivisions here have weird rules, outdated and stuck in the 70's perspective--at the time when the Philippines was sending majority of its engineers to the middle east which resulted in so many concrete, mansionic housing constructions in all parts of the country.

houses that developers prefer to build for a typical Filipino middle class. from here.

Given that there is almost a global following on green building (if not global "policy"), it is a wonder why developers still choose to have this kinds of houses in their properties. this is one energy hoarder of a house, and clearly is not adherent to the Filipino culture. So, one would think that if you by ONLY lots in subdivisions you would, at least be freer to decide on the kind of house you'd build.

WRONG.

We've been disappointed too many times once we're handed the subdivision rules and regulations. the picture of a house above remains to be the "ideal, recommended, suggested, preferred" house that subdivision developers want on their property. it makes my face hurt. it makes me want to cry. (The fact that i've been working on projects related to sustainable urban development does not help at all, it makes it the more frustrating to know that all the "advocacy" on green building  and sustainable living we've been screaming resulted to nothing but an epic failure, exemplified by the picture above.)

but there might be hope. i found a feature in archdaily that COULD make our wants and needs possible, albeit with a little compromise here and there. Presenting, another picture of a building:

isn't that lookin really nice? ain't too radical for middle class taste and the tasteless developers?
this was designed by UMWELT; site is somewhere in Chile, and can be read through archdaily, here.

This isn't just a house. it's a meditation area (dojo) and some other things. I would have wanted an umbrella house, or something similar to what Mori makes (especially the House on Gulf of Mexico, a refurbishment of a space designed by Paul Rudolph in 1957) but those are the things that we cannot afford. Also, we have yet to find very skilled builders to bring these kinds of things to life, and that again, the skills and expertise, require tons of money.

But this one, this one might be it.

Incidentally, when i mentioned this to Keith, he told me he has thought of similar design weeks earlier, actually sketched it somewhere. that might be a good sign--that we're similar birds in this aspect--err, "birds of the same feather"--and the dojo building above looks simple enough to be built by my artists friends, myself and Keith. Maybe the kid could help paint the screen or the louver so he'd know how to build a house by the time we enforce on him the COMPULSORY moving out.

(besides, don't they look like they complement, built side by side. certainly, if ever we do end up in the "modern house" kind of suburban neighborhood, we won't come with names like: "that weird family living in the dojo house.")

FIN.

puto posts

Several things happened last July. 

The major happening was, my grandmother in-law died. We spent the four weekends of that month in the island. Then the death gave way to the reunion. My mother in-law, who's residing in the other part of the world also came home, along with her sisters (who also live in that part of the world). The reunion in the wake was technically the second time I met her, my mother in-law. The first time was when her son invited me to the island for a family event (we were not even going out that time yet). Then she left the country and a lot of things happened. We met again a decade after, this time I'm with a son and married to her son, and she, on the other hand, missing a body part, and sadly, is already without a mother. 

The other happening was i brought a friend to my parents' farm to (re) acquaint him with the typical Filipino farm life. He's born a Filipino but lived in many elsewheres and he's returned to the Philippines to spend some good three months working with me (yes, i have a day job) and working out his appetite for Filipino food. He was also into film photography and i think it was one of the many reasons why we clicked, in addition to the fact that he knows and reads Granta (I have yet to meet somebody who likes Granta--and found one i did, but a citizen of another continent!). My mother fed him vegetable soup (star of the soup was the breadfruit) and little fried fishes (with heads, of course) and again he said that he's really close to deciding to permanently live in the Philippines. Alas, he had to leave a week after the visit to finish the remaining semester in the university, back in the place of four seasons and a good urban biking program. 

then i ran out of film.

FIN

Toddler photography with a flash!

Gogol was recently gifted a black Yashica t4, bought for 10 dollars at a camera store several seas away, from across the continent. this camera has a plastic body and comes with a flash (!!), a very novel technology from the flashless slr cameras at home.

Gogol has been wanting to shoot. i could tell judging by the frequency of his nags to shoot his installations or his drawings (but never himself; never a portrait of him). He would most often prefer they were shot digitally, and was initially disappointed seeing that my minolta did not have an lcd screen where it should be. he soon learned the realities of film photography and is now just happy to shoot, regardless of when he'd actually see the product of his work on print (or scan, i should say).

the first shots of his yashica was with a Fuji Superia 200 film that was also bought from across the universe. it came in 24 shots; quite expensive at 5 dollars (exclusive of tax).

when the film scans came back from the processing center, again, the flash photography was something of a wonder. Keith and I thought it was amazing. I'm thinking i would try the camera (and the flash mode) in one of my walks.

lovely, lovely camera.
Yashica T4 justifies the want to expand on the Yashica slr collection.


FIN.