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TROPICAL LIVING
Contemporary Dream Houses In The Philippines
Text by Elizabeth V. Reyes / Photographs by Chester Ong (Periplus Editions [HK] Ltd., Hong Kong, 2000)
Only being amply visible (bookshop display marketing-wise) in Manila in 2002, this book is part of a series on Asian tropical houses that was printed by a Hong Kong publishing house in the year 2000 yet.
At the outset, let me quickly assure you that the Philippine edition of the Tropical Living series does not become your typical coffeetable book that features only the houses of the rich. In effect, at least, even though it does just that. (For after all, one is tempted to ask, where are the bamboo and coco-lumber houses of architects Rosario "Ning" Encarnacion-Tan, et al? Among others.) Yes, this book mainly features houses of staggeringly well-off friends of the author, but some of the architectural achievements here presented are middle-class (the house of my modest classmate Elmer Borlongan, the successful painter, and his wife, a fellow artist, is probably the house-and-lot affair with the lowest budget in this book, though still "very successful" by Filipino standards). The universality occurs in the celebration of things within the interiors, stuff even the B-market “working class” can empathize with.
Of course if this were a Cultural Center of the Philippines- or University of the Philippines-published book you can be sure it'll feature the houses of that working class, along with those of the peasantry, the ethnic tribes, and the squatters in general, sharing the limelight with the houses of the lower-middle class, the middle class, the quasi-taipans, the taipans, and the encomiendero families.
But let it go. After all, to those in whatever economic level interested in house improvements, Tropical Living can still be read and most likely would come as a grand sampling of possibilities instead of limitations on the theme of appropriateness for tropical living. Done, of course, the Filipino (as against the Balinese, Japanese, Hong Kong/Taipei Chinese, Singaporean, Indonesian, Thai, or Polynesian) way, inclusive of adaptations and assimilations, whether by way of the jetsetting lifestyles of the featured owners or by way of watching too much HGTV (via Lifestyle Network on Manila's Sky or Home Cable). And all at a price uncommon in coffeetable books with the visual grandeur of this.
In contrast to such books as Doreen Fernandez and Edilberto Alegre's Sarap: Essays On Philippine Food (reviewed below) that refuses to go the way of coffeetable-book treatment, however, Reyes' likely commissioned book had no choice but to provide mere samples of architectural achievement. Oh certainly the legendary Bobby Mañosa's little revolutions weren't limited to indigenous-material usage; and certainly Leandro Locsin's assimilation of the Frank Lloyd Wright philosophy was not limited to use of Manila-abundant volcanic rock as cladding for local-concrete walls; but, okay, again there simply wasn't enough space in the book for this. Chester Ong's awesome photography work was to take center-stage. Research on your own, the book seemed to say, if this sampler of Filipino/Filipinized creative personages and their produce awakens your interest.
But if this was to be a book on tropical houses, maybe I'd have to take exception to the chapter on modernist-minimalist units -- the houses needed the author's clarification on the issue of natural ventilation. Was (Bench [no relation to the UK clothing brand]) fashion guru Ben Chan's house designed to contain 24-hour air-conditioning with all that glass?
I would agree with the author that natural ventilation is of primary importance in Philippine home architecture unless one's house is near an oil depot or mackerel canning factory. But I found the author's cheerfulness towards Filipino architecture's (and interior design's) embrace of tropical light (skylight, large picture windows above two-storey living rooms, floor-to-ceiling windows, etc.) in need of explication. After all, this embrace is to be found in all national architectures. In Filipino-movie scenes set in poorer quarters (The Flor Contemplacion Story, supposedly shot at the subject's house, Insiang, Scorpio Nights, Azucena, Bulaklak ng Maynila, Balahibong Pusa, etc.), or in houses on small lots alongside other small houses on small lots, we can see there the proclivity to put privacy and murkiness over and above the welcome of tropical light. Author Reyes' failure to differentiate two versions of the upper- and upper middle-class' embrace of tropical light, namely between the one behind tropical leaves and the other behind nothing under the hot sun (even as she mentions a Mexican influence), simply leaves us with questions about why most Filipinos react to the heat with cooling designs while Mexican house designs consciously worship the sun. Consequently, other cultural questions crop up . . . Were the Mexican influences on certain Filipino design solely on a decorative level? And were the Bodhisattvas in some of the houses merely reflective of a propensity in us for cute appropriation of international icons? Or were these of deeper connotations beyond being mere objects brought there? Are the Zen pebbles in many of the houses' parts indicative of a true Zen influence from the Second World War or simply a manifestation of our Americanized ownership sense (a Good Housekeeping Magazine influence?) towards appearances and objects/items, indicative -- rather -- of our having since that war period become mundane mga taong walang diyos, as a Mario O'Hara movie would put it?
One important passage, however, was Reyes' pregnant note on '50s to '60s middle-class house styles that were ludicrously emulating American split-level plans for flat Manila landscapes. May I add: "fireplaces" in some houses! Oh yes, and today, the trend to place American-style attics below oven-hot ceilings (appropriate for Tagaytay and Baguio resthouses, however)! Contrast this indio colonialism with "insulare" Jaime Zobel de Ayala's or Philippine-based French and Filipino couple Hubert and Ara d'Aboville's insistence on all-Philippine, if not all-Mindoro, materials for their Mindoro affairs. There's your indio hospitality in the former, towards anything except the local. Indeed, I say, the way to economically enslave a banana country and nation is to let its people desire for the perpetuation of your enslaving them. In effect that would domino into letting them hate their kind.
I'd like to close this review with a request. Reyes and Ong should pair yet again, this time to de-celebrate inappropriate architecture and interior design for Philippine living. That certainly would produce a book just as amazing (and patriotic?) as this one.
also look for Gilda Cordero-Fernando's Folk Architecture, Fernando Nakpil Zialcita's Philippine Ancestral Houses: 1810-1930 (1980), and Zialcita and Reyes' Filipino Style (1997).
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SARAP
Essays On Philippine Food
Doreen Fernandez & Edilberto Alegre (Mr. & Ms. Publishing, Manila, 1988)
Recently metropolitan Manila's business districts have seen a conflagration of imports-ridden A-crowd venues like Glorietta 4, The Rockwell Plant, Eastwood City, The Podium, the new Araneta Center, etc., ad nauseam, that Doreen Fernandez' pronouncements, to the effect that Filipino taste buds must be in the process of transformation (with no going back) into something totally foreign, just may be a tad too understated as a prediction. Our mga kain-sa-labas are fast changing our houses' pantry contents, thanks too to McCormick's! I say "Filipino" taste buds, generally speaking, instead of just the Pinoy elite's, because -- the lower bracket's eternally-aspiring subconscious aside -- the affordable American fastfood networks' fare (McDonald's, etc.) also have become such a part of the Filipino general public's vocabulary that the Happy Meal may just as soon push itself into Filipino dictionaries whether our lexicographers like it or not.
Somehow, even taking a nationalist stance, I would yet not be so alarmed. For while Fernandez backs up her and Edilberto Alegre's coming out with this book with the rationale of preservation of the traditional (albeit dynamic) Filipino food of our homes, our city sidewalks, and our provinces, all in the light of imported food proliferation and their quick assimilation into the national pastime of eating and drinking, she and Alegre (in separate tracts) likewise spare no ink on the issue of how the Filipino amazingly adopts and adapts things foreign (for instance, how he unconsciously translated the traditional Chinese dumplings culture into the Filipino habits or art or philosophy or science of eating is supposedly to be taken as a nationalistic feat).
Having said a mouthful of that, however, why else buy this book? Maybe if only because you enjoyed such pop movies as Woman On Top, Like Water for Chocolate, Chocolat, or even less famous ones like Tampopo. And, in your turn, been obliged to ask, "would I be in a position to be able to write such movies using my own people's food culture?" -- preferably without diving into esoterica the way our country's Valladolid (Spain) International Film Festival finalist, Azucena (Dog Meat), did.
And why else buy this book? If only because it might help the chef in you to rationalize his/her adaptations cum innovations. Why is he/she coming up, for example, with such a creature as wet, sour tuna burger balls (sans bun of course) meant to be dipped further in Bicol Express-esque sauce? Not that I've seen one like this weirdness already, though I may just come up with it, haha. Why? Because Sarap says sinigang sourness makes the body cope with the heat? Because Sarap says saltiness and peppery-ness would jive well with bland, filling rice?
Why buy this book? If only because one must answer one's own questions while dining at Friday's or The Podium. Sure we have questions too about the foreign food we like to brag we love, since we're wont to complain about how salt-poor this or that foreign-named dish is -- maybe it was supposed to be eaten with herbs-flavored bread and wine, stupid! And then we're also likely to repeatedly complain about how hard this or that european bread is -- maybe traditionally it's to be dipped in the mushroom soup! The absence of important questions that a few of us might dare to posit must be answered, however: for sure we laugh at our tendency to make ulam of salty sotanghon (made from mung beans) for our rice, but what's really so exceptionally funny about that when the Americans we worship would usually fill their plates with french fries to go with their bun-enclosed burgers? I mean, even in winter, couldn't there be a better veggie companion for burger? And so, therefore, a question we might better pose should be something like this: if I'm consuming a New England, USA-style burger in veggie-rich Manila, would potato fries still be contextually correct? Or should the experience be gone through the way you'd take a tour inside a generated snow zone in a Manila park? Sure, context-seeking may be the habit of book-reviewers, but isn't it also the habit of employees wont to disagree with their bosses' choice of conference venues? One of them might loudly ask in one of the sessions, "sir, why's the water goblet in this hotel tinted? Is it (with the chill) perhaps to hide the hotel's water's murkiness?"
Certainly, for employees and executives, the coffee at Manila's Starbucks outlets can be a respite from those Nestle or Cafe Puro 3-in-1 sachets. But, as in Dumaguete I would take a similar route (out of the lodging-house pantry) to get great coffee at the palengke where tricycle drivers get their fill, it would precisely serve one's worldliness (especially if one was an executive) to be aware of the basics of things (their histories and cultural backbones). It is usually thus that he/she might be able to sit back and burp, assured of being one step worthier of his/her title or his/her new global account wins. After all, in a country brainwashed into thinking that it was the Americans who taught them democracy in spite of the Malolos Constitution, Bonifacio's Karl Popperian propensity for abdicating intellection to ilustrado thinkers (Rizal, chiefly), and above all their sinigang culture's most open utopia for regional/class/or individual variation, a little bit of additional knowledge on the crucial myths as myths would certainly go a long way in shaping that country's future political, economic, and business policies.
Or should that country's people forever satisfy themselves with being proud franchisees and licensees of foreign brand successes? For, if so, maybe they shouldn't complain so hard of the second-class treatment on their persons, their nation, and their currency, a treatment incidentally that is constantly served their way. For maybe, just maybe, that is their just dessert.
-- uploaded June 2002 --
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Copyright © 2002 Vicente Soria de Veyra. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
