‘Makati is flanked by cookie-cutter buildings, says Architect Lira Luis

Architect Lira Luis is a towering landmark on the Filipino-American landscape. Her work has been featured in leading American publications and exhibited in state museums. She is in the registry of “Who’s Who Among Executive and Professional Women in America (Honors Edition)” by Cambridge Who’s Who Registry of New York, 2007.

The only Filipino to have graduated from Taliesin West – Frank Lloyd Wright’s School of Architecture – since its establishment in 1937, she started a Lira Luis Brand, with offices in New York, Phoenix and Manila. She also heads Progressive Habitats Foundation, an organization that offers design services to the homeless and helps in rebuilding the flood-devastated Mississippi.

She first got our attention last year when she designed a $4-million mall in Arizona patterned after the Philippine nipa hut in collaboration with American Architect George Sheller. “It is not a literal interpretation of the indigenous house in our country, more of utilizing the bahay kubo’s stilts. The stilts for the mall were angled in such a way that they give the impression of movement and activity which are important elements in any restaurant or retail environment.”

Aside from this project, Lira became famous for her Portable Transient Shelter Pods, a runner-up in Metropolis Magazine’s NEXT Generation design competition. “It’s a housing solution that was originally designed for homeless seafarers in the Philippines. When the project did not push through, a British Columbia non-profit organization expressed interest in this idea for one of their disaster-stricken areas. Then came the Asian tsunami that found another use for the Pods.”

Lira has likewise come up with an affordable housing solution dubbed as the “M.O.D. House for an International Design Competition. It became a finalist out of over 440 entries in the HOME House Project: The Future of Affordable Housing competition organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) some years ago. She collaborated with Navin Pathangay and Chris Ilg – architect-friends from a leading architectural firm in Phoenix – and with Steve Soenksen, a fellow Taliesin graduate.

The project’s criteria included a design with environmentally conscious materials, technologies, and methods for single-family houses using Habitat for Humanity’s basic three- and four-bedroom house plans.

The M.O.D House has since been exhibited along with other select entries in prestigious venues like the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis and The Gallery of New York School of Interior Design. It is also featured in a book published by MIT Press. Prototypes of the HOME House Project finalists will soon be built in South Carolina.

“I want to be known as a socially responsible architect,” says Lira who is currently based in Chicago, the same city where Frank Lloyd Wright first built his Oakpark Home and Studio as a young architect, and where Ernest Hemingway lived. She admits that she has a soft spot for the homeless which could be the result of having studied in the School of the Holy Spirit in Quezon City (elementary and high school) and the University of Santo Tomas (BS Architecture). “Oh yes,” she chuckles, “those five years of Theology at UST!”

Graduating cum laude from the University of Santo Tomas in 1995, she was offered a scholarship by prestigious schools in England and Scotland but she chose the Taliesin West scholarship.

Only a maximum of 35 students are accepted in Taliesin West’s Bachelor and MA programs every year, out of the thousands who apply from different countries. She took its masteral program for three years, staying in a studio at daytime and sleeping each night in a tent without electricity, phone and water, in its 600-acre property. It is part of the school’s experiential training that connects students to their environment in the Arizona desert. “We were trained to co-exist with nature.” The great Frank Lloyd Wright was a proponent of organic architecture. He believed that the structure should blend with, not impose, on nature. He also believed that humanity should be central to all design.

“I have always admired Frank Lloyd Wright. It was such a joy to study and live in a building that he designed. My other favorite structures are Fallingwater in Pennsylvania (with a stream and waterfall running under the building) and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York which is like a seashell.”

In 2006, she went back to Manila for the first time after seven years, and launched an audio book about FLW’s architecture titled “Frankly Speaking: It’s the Wright Way .” The book-launching was held at Oakwood Premier, by Ayala Land, Incorporated, a company she worked for ten years ago. On November 9-11, she will have a book-signing during the 75th Taliesen Fellowship reunion to be held in Taliesen West, Scottsdale, Arizona.

Lira is also a big fan of Ayn Rand who wrote “The Fountainhead”. “Did you know that Ayn Rand spent some time at Taliesin West while writing her novel and that her protagonist was patterned after Wright?”

Lira is exceptionally articulate, hardly pausing during the interview, as if she does not run out of ideas. She also sounds very enthusiastic about any topic that is brought up. No wonder she is often invited to speak at architects’ conventions in the US and the Philippines. Recently she spoke before the National Alzheimer’s Association about high performance buildings.

What does she think of the high-rise buildings in Hong Kong? Lira says they have their own charm and character. “I like the design of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building. It’s innovative.” But she says she does not care for the Cathedral of Sagrada Familia in Spain, designed by Antonio Gaudi. “It reminds me of melting candles.” This cathedral has been under construction for over a century.

Lira notes that after September 11, some American architects have designed buildings with a hole in the middle, perhaps a subliminal defense against another Twin Towers plane attack. They are also into green buildings.

She does not think the Philippines buys the principles of organic architecture very much. In her website, she freely expresses what she thinks of the Makati skyscrapers:

“Makati is flanked by cookie-cutter buildings designed by foreigners who have displayed a total lack of understanding of a tropical country in a lower latitude close to the equator. Why did we allow this to happen? Partly due to Filipino mindset of colonialism and branding. Anything imported, in this case designed by a foreigner, must be good. This is contrary to the organic architecture I’ve learned. A building needs to be site-specific. One can’t just pluck the floor plan of a building from out of an industrialized nation like America then build it in a country in different latitude. It’s like buying a fur coat in New York because it’s hip and trendy then wearing it in Manila where it’s 30 + degrees C.”

Lira thinks President Gloria Arroyo needs to support initiatives that create environmental awareness and responsibility. The government needs to establish a national benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high-performance buildings.

Architects need to help solve the environmental problem through design. “I’m currently pursuing accreditation from LEED to become a professional Sustainable Design Expert. Government buildings are now required to be LEED-certified in the U.S.”

Lira had passed the architectural board examination in Manila before she came over to America but she also took the US board soon after she finished her graduate studies in 2000. “The US Architect Registration Exam (ARE) is comprised of nine rigorous exam divisions that you need to pass and which you can take, one day for each subject. There was one that lasted eight hours straight. Not even a five-minute break for us to go to the bathroom.”

As expected, she passed the nine exams, but she was modest about this accomplishment. “It was hard in the sense that the US codes are different from what we were taught back home. But the software training I got in the Philippines is comparable to what they have in America.” She is proficient in many softwares including Autodesk’s Autocad and Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD.

Lira is equally modest about her background. “I come from a middle class family in Quezon City. My father is a retired military colonel while my mother is an educator.” She played keyboard in an all-women band in high school and now plays golf occasionally, and has performed in theatrical productions in Wisconsin and Arizona.

She reveals that her sun sign is Aquarius. “I am a bit eccentric, an out-of-the-box thinker. I am open and experimental.” She says her ideal home “should be part of nature, blends with nature, one with nature. It should definitely grace the landscape.”