Manila Arts + Culture Center

This year's architecture design competition is nurtured by a cultural agenda

that endeavors to complement and enhance Philippine arts, culture and
tourism by building a Civic Center. This is an iconic addition to Manila's more
than 30 museums and cultural architecture shall be designed to contain
exhibition spaces with high degree of flexibility that allows for a myriad of
curatorial designs and, at the same time, showcase the collection of works
constituted primarily of MADE Competition winning entries.
With a
commitment to art education, the facility shall also house workshop spaces
devoted of art and design training and collateral activities that will enhance
the understanding and creative skills of the community.
Envisioned not only as a cultural hub of the metropolis but as a tourist
destination itself, the Manila Arts + Culture Center is to be located in the
most progressive district in Metro Manila the Bonifacio Global City. This
conceptual civic art center will rise on a triangular-shaped space with a total
area of 1,423 square meters at the core of the master-planned estate of
Veritown Fort, a mixed-use township development with 12 residential, office
and hotel towers with premier dining, upscale retail spaces and boutiques.
The design parameters are bound up with the structure's potential to
represent identity especially for an emergent city like Fort Bonifacio to
promote its distinctiveness in the global competition for prestige and its
share of the cultural tourism market, and with corporations deploying the
museum as part of their own image-marketing. With a construction cost
within the range of 45 to 50 million pesos, the design brief calls for a costeffective creative concept that reflects Philippine culture with a global edge,
employ innovative and appropriate building technology, and adhere to the
principles of green architecture and socio-economic sustainability.
From the design entries received this year, a remarkable aesthetic shift could
be detected a clear renunciation of pervasive museum iconography from
our cultural imagination, one that is classical, conservative, and old. To mark
the structures significance in urban landscape, the architectural symbology
that is grand, monumental and horizontal is no longer pursued but a
programmatic feature characterized by dialogic space, public intimacy, and
spatial versatility becomes apparent. Today, the design of museums is
collaborative, multidisciplinary, multifaceted and complex attested by a
myriad of museological and interpretative approaches that we see across the
contemporary museum in the world. Museums as an architectural typology is
undergoing a drastic reinvention from monumental temples of civilizing
rituals to high-profile and iconic signature buildings, evocative landscapes,
sophisticated and affective exhibition spaces striving to create a narrative
environmenta space that integrates artifacts with the experiences of

people. Such space is entwined with a memorable process of storytelling

that portrays the experience of the quotidian and creates a sense of identity
for oneself in the entire museum experience.
In a post-Bilbao age, when spectacular museum architecture can catalyze
cultural tourism and urban renewal, the museum is no longer a sober
repository of cultural properties but a vibrant space of infotainment,
providing an engaging scenography for staging multi-media experiences.
#StArt.UP
Recognizing that existing museum design in the country are highly formal
and enclosed with little or no public interface, the design proposal strives to
reconceptualize the museum as urban park, a design concept which
empowers the public to interact, appreciate, and consume art. The facility is
designed as a symbolic portal of urban civility in the Veritown development
with an architecture that maintains the ground space open to public.
Destined as a cultural hub, the plan creates multiple nodes of interaction
encouraging people meet, create a sense of community, and partake in the
performance of culture.
Due to the limitation imposed by the triangular lot, the entire structure is
lifted to free up the ground floor as an open public space. The spaces that
are created interpenetrate and flow seamlessly allowing for greater flexibility
of use and become conducive for civic life to flourish. The open plan
therefore is versatile and can be configured depending on the requirement
for exhibition, performance or trade events.
Overall, the architecture rise on a triangular plot as a modern sculptural
form, whose folded and faceted surface is precisely cut in rational
triangulated geometric patterns. Spatial transitions are so smooth and fluid
that the boundary of the exterior is blurred. The museum represents a fully
embodied experience of objects and media within a three-dimensional space,
revealing itself in potentially free-flowing sequential arrangements.
The museums architecture take inspiration from the earths geologic
formations: how landforms naturally form the ground and how it defines a
fluid terrain. Natural landscape formation architectonically inspires the
geometry of the building without resorting to physical mimicry. The fluidity of
the landscape became the leitmotif the dissolves the separation of floor, wall
and ceiling as distinct planar boundaries. Another significant element in this
pursuit was transparency not only through the use of glass and openings but
consciously create tantalizing glimpses of vistas and visual penetration of

spaces through the introduction of voyeuristic spaces to encourage

interaction and chance encounters among the different users of the building.
The geometric manipulation yields landscaped pathways that lead to the
green roof and viewing platform. The building skin is formed by series of
lattices spontaneously repeated throughout the structure. The randomly
placed and obliquely angled lattice surfaces imbue the structure with
deconstructed image of capiz window panes, the ubiquitous architectural
element Philippine built archetypes. The openings are made at strategic
areas that necessitate natural lighting within the museum. Since this lattice
device is independent from the main structural frame, the amount of light
can be modulated and adjusted depending on the exhibition and
programmatic requirement within.
At the core of this aesthetic vision, the museum becomes a theater to a
dramatic ritual, a narrative of the world we inhabit, an emotive site where
space and place form a nexus with human perception, communal
imagination, and collective memory.