Royal Pineda of Budji + Royal talks about the country’s newest business hub, New Clark City, and about designing an entire city inspired by Filipino sensibilities.
words by Sam Beltran
One could feast their eyes on a vast stretch of nothing but pasture, all 9,000 hectares of it, and see nothing. But for top Filipino design duo Budji + Royal, this presented a tremendous opportunity.
These stalwarts of Filipino design and architecture had been presented with the opportunity of a lifetime: designing the New Clark City, the Philippines’ next hub for international trade and commerce, the newest destination that is supposed to uplift the country’s portfolio as a rising star for global business and infrastructure in the face of Manila’s worsening congestion, and the daunting possibility of “The Big One”. And it’s quite a feat, really, to head the creative vision for not one, two or three buildings, but essentially be the master planners of an emerging world-class city.
Of course it sounds like an incredibly ambitious undertaking that will raise skeptics’ eyebrows, especially coming from a nation that does not exactly hold the best track record for follow-through. Yet if there’s anyone that was more than willing to step up to the plate, it’s Budji Layug and Royal Pineda.
Individually, Budji and Royal hold stellar accomplishments of their own: Budji, the Principal Designer and Chairman is a pioneer in using traditional techniques and indigenous materials such as bamboo long before the world fell in love with tropical design; Royal, who is Principal Architect and CEO, made his career as a hotshot architect, seeking tutelage form National Artist for Architecture Leandro Locsin. Together as a firm, however, Budji + Royal have become an unstoppable force, taking on projects that challenge the concept of modern Filipino design and architecture.
“I never thought of designing our city — I was happy enjoying my private practice”, Royal Pineda shares. True enough, the pair made a lucrative career out of their usual repertoire of posh resorts and exclusive residences, bringing their bold designs that feature an interplay between local elements and nature. “But you know, it’s always been my and Budji’s constant collaboration in all the things that we are doing — we travel, and then we come back and we see the country again, then we always talk about, ‘How do you make this city better?’” What is frustrating to the architect is that innovative Filipino design and architecture exists, but never reaches public consciousness. ‘I think you need to have the heart to think for the many and dream for the many, not for yourself”, Royal muses. “Whenever we talk about modern Filipino architecture and design, yes, we are doing it but it’s always landing in the very high-end private homes in the private resorts that are expensive, and my frustration personally as an architect is that I don’t get to make the public — the real Filipinos out there feel that sensibility.”
Massive plans are underway for New Clark City, some of which have already begun and are expecting completion within the year and the next. The Philippine Sports City Complex is due for turnover this August in time for the SEA Games, a district that contains world-class sports facilities such as the 20,000-capacity Athletics Stadium and the Aquatic Center, as well as premier housing for local athletes. Both the Athletics Stadium and the Aquatic Center are cutting-edge amenities that showcase the duo’s mettle, incorporating Filipino elements such as capiz and Mount Pinatubo into daring architectural feats, all while meeting international standards. Meanwhile, the much-touted second terminal of the Clark International Airport is eyeing a 2020 deadline, a Sierra Madre-inspired hub spanning 140,000 square meters, as large as Hong Kong International Airport Terminal 2.
The New Clark City is many things, but what it isn’t is a template of another megapolis; it’s not aiming to be another New York or Shanghai, let alone Makati or BGC. A core element of Budji + Royal’s ethos is defining Clark as the “Modern Philippine City”, harbored on a strong local identity that shaped its design blueprint. Royal shares, “When we were tapped to work with the government, the way they were [initially selling] the project such as ‘The Green City’, ‘The Sustainable City’… and if you really look at it, there are better green cities in the world and there are more sustainable cities in the world. So when we asked them, ‘What makes this city different?’, nobody could answer us.”
The best course, they thought, was to look inward, creating standards for themselves and studying from a design perspectives the actual needs of the country instead of competing with other cities. “I told them, ‘You know, I think the best thing to do is to own this project by birthright and name it as the Modern Philippine City’”, Royal explains, “Because Italy will never do a Modern Philippine City, they’ll do a Modern Italian City. I mean at least by name and by aspiration, we’ll try to see something forward and try to ignite something that will make the people want to see a betterment of the country.” Rethinking the New Clark City as an innovative development within the local context took the project out of a rut and the rest, as they say, is history. “So, when we started to talk about the Modern Philippine City, it brought in a new dimension to the project — everybody was now challenged to dig in to what [defines] a Modern Philippine City”, Royal adds. “For me it’s like, I don’t want to be a copy-paste of the world, I don’t want to be a victim of that [mentality], I don’t want to be a repeat of what they have done.”
Great cities require great infrastructure, which Royal knows the country does not have much of. So the idea was never to construct state-of-the-art buildings through the most expensive means, but to make the best out of what we have in true Pinoy fashion. “Modernity is not about steel glass and concrete. Modernity is the mindset so we have to have the freedom to think of what is progressive”, Royal shares. “We are a very tropical country, and I think we don’t need to be competing with the first world in terms of trying to be luxurious as the green city or the sustainable city — we cannot afford it really, to be honest”, Royal laughs. Instead, New Clark City thrives on sustainability and practical solutions that answer to the call of the difficulties in living in a tropical, typhoon-prone climate. Achieving this sophisticated yet cost-effective design approach is what Royal dubs as “practical luxury”, not through expensive materials but from humble things and root them in nature.
A brilliant example is the usage of lahar in place of conventional concrete — it’s 30 percent cheaper than hollow blocks, and naturally becomes thermally insulated which is better suited for Filipino houses in the all-year sun. There is of course, a poetry to co-opting lahar to build residences after once ravaging homes in the Pinatubo eruption. Now, we have plenty of it being put to use. Royal shares, “We are using the lahar as the new fabric and the fiber of the city, because it’s basically for us, nature brought it out, its beauty, and I think it’s like saying, ‘Use me’. It’s nature saying, ‘I am Pinatubo, I was placed in Tarlac, in Pampanga, and this is my material.’”
Aside from its insulating properties, there is also an effortlessly refined look to lahar as walls and floors, a warmer appearance than typical concrete. “The way that lahar looks like, you know it’s something you just leave alone. It’s low maintenance, zero maintenance”, Royal declares, adding, “Once we present a way life wherein it addresses the Filipinos modern lifestyle, and we have refined it to the point that we believe that this is how we should live today as better Filipinos, the world will see that.”
Part of Budji + Royal’s plan is to lift buildings up from the ground, allowing for open spaces below where people can freely walk under them, these structures providing them shade. They call it “permeability”, where the city should be permeable enough to allow the free passage of air, unobstructed by towers while returning the land to the people. “It’s never about the architects showing their egos to be flamboyant, and then designing a spectacular building and then you totally forget the people. In this city, we protect the people from the heat of the sun and we make people breathe because of the permeability of the buildings and it becomes more walkable aside from just doing all these covered walks”, Royal explains. Completely unlike Makati, where the planning has become an afterthought; Makati is designed for buildings where developers build all the way to the property line, sacrificing sidewalks. Yet, all of these ideas are not so revolutionary — it’s tapping into our DNA to look into what we need. “ Like the bahay kubo, it was common sense; you lift it up because there’s mud when it rains, and there are predators during night time, they were just responding clearly to what is common sense. We’re only doing common sense here.”
Yet, common sense is what drives this incredible vision. The Filipino’s signature ingenuity, Royal predicts, is what will drive New Clark City and the Philippines into the global forefront. “I see the New Clark City as a model of a tropical city, though this is the modern Philippine city, it will be a laboratory for any tropical nation to look into and see how honest, how practical, that you can build your city without so much effort.” To do that, we only need to look at ourselves.
