Next Generation Architects

• Hosts of WTA Architecture and Design Studio:
• Arvin Pangilinan
• Berly Locsin
• Alexa Arañaz

Host: Our topic today is “Next Generation Architects.” We wanted to highlight what the next generation of architects can bring to the table to shape our cities. Here’s the first question: What influenced your architectural practice and philosophy, and how do you aim to influence the next generation of architects?

Aris Go: I started practicing in 2004 with small houses. I didn’t work for anyone and started from scratch. My aim was simply to do architecture, and there was no philosophy, no underlying intention to just doing it. Years went by, and then I stayed in Sydney for three years because I was a bit frustrated with what was happening in the country at that time.

But it was while I was in Sydney I realized how much I value our country. I decided to come back and practice, not in Manila, but in the small city of Baguio, where I’m from.

My goal now is simply to do our practice and make a difference in our city. Our mission is just to help fix our city. That is our core mission. That’s why we do a lot of public projects. Some we even do pro bono because we want to create something new and fresh for our city.

Matthieu Bégoghina: We come from a different culture, and that’s always a part of us. We bring in what we know but, at the same time, we do our best to know the place we are in and try to help the people the best way we can. With my students, it’s trying to make them understand and see all the opportunities and capacities they have in the world around us. We do it by reframing how they see different places—really looking at what’s around us and the best we can do to improve that.

Christian Salandanan: I worked with Bobby Mañosa and was inspired to see the indigenous materials he used, mainly natural bamboo, and how he used it. We want to focus on the gap between our available bamboo and the available developments using bamboo.

Kath Sapungay: When you hear “bamboo,” you think temporary, or you think bahay kubo. We want people to know that you can make permanent structures out of this. We want to develop and explore the use of this material in our architecture. We want to push the limit of this material.

Jeffrey Cheah: I started my architecture practice with a community-based project. When I was studying architecture, I learned to design pavilion houses, shelter houses for the community. I like to work in workshops and work with my hands. I can work from zero until I’m finished. I also learned a lot from being at the construction site.

I think what’s important is going to the community to see what they need. So after I graduated, I joined the WTA, following architect William Ti. His practice is about social architecture. So he influenced me a lot. When I came back to Malaysia, I wanted to start with something small, community-based. So I encourage young architects to go to the community itself and blend in.

Because when I came to the Philippines, it was my first time. I tried to learn more about their culture. So when we designed the emergency quarantine facility, you can see what the people desire, what they need. And then you create something that gives them a sense of belonging and a sense of community to help bring the people closer together even when they are socially distanced.

Host: How about you, Antonius? What influenced your practice and philosophy, and how do you aim to influence the next generation of architects?

Antonius Richard: Well, I guess people tend to underestimate the power of one person. We underestimate what we can do as opposed to what we think our government can do. We started our practice three years ago. Before that, we were practicing hard architecture. Then we realized that our situation is unique in Indonesia and developing countries, in the attitude towards sustainable architecture being a luxury, not a necessity. It’s still a choice.

Therefore what we’re trying to practice is we demonstrate sustainable architecture. How can we get there? You’re trying to influence people. You just got to be creative. What’s important is to show people in ways they can understand that sustainability is a necessity.

Host: In your view, what current trends are starting now, which you think can be a big part of the future of architecture?

Christian: I see a shift in material selection to more environmentally conscious, outward-looking materials. I see this in small items to construction materials, from bamboo products available in the market to buildings, like resorts selecting bamboo as their primary material.

With this generation, I appreciate that people are now conscious of the materials used for construction. It’s a pretty good trend because we can expect more buildings to use this material in the future. We can now do more with this raw material. It can be strengthened, cross-laminated. It can be further pushed forward with the help of technology.

Aris: We’ve been using timber in all of our projects since I started my practice in 2004. And you know, it’s difficult for wood to gain acceptance, especially in our country. But the pandemic and increased interest in well-being have seen a resurgence of timber in the interface with people.

Internationally, I see greater use of timber—cross-laminated timber or CLTs and lumber. Climate change and sustainability have played a vital role in this. I don’t see that going away. And if you take a look at your Instagram feed, if you’re following several architecture firms, at least one architecture project would be related to timber.

Host: Alex, what about you? The Venice Biennale pavilion you helped design is made of wood. Does that have to do with the trend Aris just talked about?

Alexander Furunes: I think it’s interesting that Kath, Christian, and Aris are talking about the change of material choice. Whether it is bamboo or wood, what’s important is the materials we use to build fit the lifestyle of those for whom we design.

Because using bamboo is a lifestyle. No building is permanent at all. Any structure you build, none of it is permanent. In Norway, we construct a lot with timber, which requires maintenance at regular intervals. Our building, the one I am in, is about a hundred years old now, and it requires maintenance every ten years.

So whatever material you choose and end up working with requires a change of mindset and attitude amongst the people where you work. The choice of material becomes natural to the way of life of the people that use it.

Regarding the general awareness of sustainability, I think very quickly we will all realize that it certainly is a necessity. We need to find ways to build sustainably socially, environmentally, and politically on every level. And reaching that balance is a process of negotiation.

What you see in the Venice Biennale is in answer to the question, “How Will We Live Together?” It’s a lot of fascinating, exciting contributions dealing with that kind of negotiation because I think there is an almost universal agreement that we need to improve things. It’s just a question of how we do so.

What does it mean in that shared consciousness of what it means to build today when we have these conflicts and these issues and the challenges we need to address? This is all fascinating because it’s touching on the same conflicts, the same questions that we’re facing in the Biennale, not just for the Philippine pavilion but also for other pavilions in the Biennale.

Jeffrey: I would compare the coronavirus pandemic to previous crises that have impacted cities, which led to improvements in building standards. The pandemic could speed up the adoption of more sustainable design and lifestyles. Because of the absence of safe transport, we’ve seen the rise of bicycle use in Manila. But you can’t go long distances on a bike, so that opens developers’ and policy makers’ minds to mixed-use cities where you don’t need to take the bus to get what you need.

Trends like these will transform the city center and the local neighborhood, making them more walkable and bike-friendly. And if the city is planned correctly, car parking which eats up so much space would be significantly reduced. Now is the time to push harder to build self-sustaining cities while the mindset of the people is slowly changing because of the challenges the pandemic imposed upon us.

Antonius: It’s a fascinating question, but a tough one. I’m pretty jealous of the panelists here who have found their path already in the process of doing architecture. It is a rare thing to do.

Talking about “trends” is a dangerous word to use. Because that’s what differentiates architecture from other design endeavors. Architecture, if done right, should last for centuries. Any trend that you are using now will leave a footprint in the years to come. So answering that question now will be very hard, especially for me in Indonesia. We are the biggest archipelago in the world. Having 276 million people using different materials. Architecture influences. We are a designer of spaces. You could impact something that we haven’t studied; would its carbon footprint still be what we assume it is today?

The trend will be whatever China produces in the next five to ten years. For sure. We have been struggling with creating sustainable buildings for years. The problem is China hasn’t started to go there yet. Yeah. So whatever sustainability is, it is hard because it is not mass-produced.

When China starts producing everything in a sustainable manner and approach, everything will become way cheaper. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s true. So whenever China does police its products, I try not to be skeptical and see how we can adopt these things. And then probably mix and match whatever resources we have in architecture.

Architecture is not the inventor; we are more an organizer. Some of us are good enough to craft our materials. I hope to have new materials made, such as fungus and other natural resources endemic to Indonesia.

Audrey Lopez: We realize how the trends in sustainability can indeed be political, but Matthieu and I were thinking one of the trends on the uptick—again, it is about sustainability—is the triple-bottom-line approach, where we consider the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of performance of sustainability.

Because for it to work, it’s not just choice of materials, but also requires culture change and thinking deeply on how we desire to build our communities that are also important. We see this in the works of Alexander and, of course, the economic aspect of it, why local sourcing materials is as important, including the sustainability attitude within the community.

Everyone is saying, “Architecture is currently moving back to its roots”—the idea of connection to one’s community, connection to one’s land and culture by the use of materials and objects. That is the way we think about our projects. What impact can it have on the community? How do we bring more meaning into places so it is less about the building and more about how people will use it?

Meaning is essential because we talk about temporality. As Alexander said, not all buildings are permanent. There are lots of buildings that possess meaning to their inhabitants. This is beyond the architecture world. It is the impact of the work on the community.

Now that we also know that our cities are overbuilt, we start to think of making our buildings adapt to future uses. Maybe our buildings should not be a mono-use type of building. The same way we think of our city. It shouldn’t just be a residential zone. Maybe mixed-use, like how we see our streets in Manila.

William Ti: Hi, Matt and Audrey, what’s up in Sydney? Hey, Alex, how are the reindeer there in Norway? How great it is you all can share your experiences working in different parts of the world—Jeffrey in Malaysia, Antonius in Indonesia, Aris in Baguio, and Kath and Christian in Manila.

My question is: What do you think are the core values in architecture that transcend differences in culture in the different places that you’ve been? What translates from one place to the other places you’ve been?

Matthieu: When I moved to the Philippines, and when I move to different countries, I come in as a foreigner. After a while, you start to learn more about the people, culture, and everything. Alex and probably Jeffrey also feel the same about how we come from being an outsider to someone that is, you know, part of the community.

I feel Filipino in many ways, even though I am far from being one. I think this is what truly transcends any culture and every place. The idea that man wants to be with other people, that we want to share, we want to live in a community. The same applies to mindsets and shared values. How do you build on that to improve or to share these values with more people? This is always something that the city could do that I think is a successful project.

Alexander: What strikes me is that we’re working in different cultures that show how similar we are, even as we come from different nations. My experience in the Philippines started with Tacloban in the Samar Leyte Region. Experiencing the concept of bayanihan and how similar it is to a Norwegian system of support and collaboration has directed my whole understanding of working through architecture.

The complexities of collaboration have political, social, and economic implications. How we choose to deliberate and make decisions as a group is a political question. The role and responsibility of the individual vis-a-vis the collective is a social question. And the access and distribution of resources are environmental and economic questions. Most cultures around the world have answered these questions in a strikingly similar way. In the Philippines, bayanihan has served as a means to work together to achieve a common goal. I have been lucky to also experience mutirão in Brazil, dignad in my home country, as well as đổi công in Vietnam, which are all types of mutual support.

And that is the way that I’m now directing my whole practice because I realize that in any culture or society I work in, there will be traditions and practices different from where I come. Still, we are so similar there’s much we can do together, especially now with the climate crisis, social conflicts, and the pandemic. We need to stop looking at what separates us and start finding ways of building together. That’s what interests me at the moment.

Aris: When I was in Australia, I wanted the practice. I needed to work in an architectural firm. I worked in construction. I wanted to see what’s on the ground. So I worked with laborers to see how different we are or how similar we are.

I think the difference here and in the places I’ve seen is that Filipinos are more intuitive than Westerners. Filipinos tend to be more intuitive than rational. And we tend to be more touchy-feely, a little more artistic, in a way. You might call that tendency to be more random or bahala na, something like that. Very different from what I’ve seen at work over there. That’s why our buildings, our structures look this way. Even if we wanted it to be more refined, it’s tough to achieve that refinement, that Norwegian refinement that we can’t find here.

But eventually, when I came back, my realization was not to change what we are but to embrace it. Embrace imperfection, embrace mistakes on site. Our workers make mistakes. We just, we allow it. We work with the errors on-site. And sometimes, they can be nothing detrimental. Imperfection, for me, is part of the work. And in the Philippines, there are a lot of imperfections.

William: Imperfection is very human, right. Kath and Christian, you work with bamboo and Antonius, with the materials you use; maybe you can share how the craftsmanship contributes to the architecture within a perfectionist world. And even Jeff, your experiences with the workers on-site and, of course, Alex, with the community workers.

Christian: In terms of the workers, I must agree with Aris. It is a challenge here in the Philippines. I see how workers from another country work with the same craft. But what we learned is that we have unique craftsmanship here in the Philippines. It’s different, and it may be imperfect, but it makes it Filipino and gives it character. It’s a Filipino character embodied in the output reflecting how we work and how our work looks.

Kath: I’d like to add to that. First of all, working with local workers, those imperfections are pretty beautiful in the sense they become part of the process, part of the building, part of the story. In the end, there is this learning curve with this building. They learn a lot and see the progress the workers have made. They started with minimal knowledge working with bamboo and completed their work, proud they took part in erecting that structure.

Sometimes, it’s the other way around. We push something global; they push back with their way of doing things. And then we architects learn it then apply it in our next design. So it’s become more of collaboration now with the workers. It’s two-way.

Aris: Alex. Do you think you’ll be able to do participatory design back in your country? The way you, Sudar, and the Locsin architects did with the community center in Tacloban?

Alexander: We’re doing it at the moment. We have two projects, one finishing now, which is also a community center. As to this idea of perfection and imperfection, there’s no perfection in Norway. I’m just saying we’re all human, everyone, so it’s how we create the conditions when we work so that the people are part of making it.

I liked that you said that, Kath, it is a two-way thing because it is! And I think many design problems and some buildings need to be solved by the real people who will build them and use them.

How do you make the builders and people who will live in it create the conditions for how the structure is designed and built? How do you create a safe place for everyone involved to do that? How do you weave all these things together? It’s the intricacy of making the participatory process work that I find fascinating.

How do you create a two-way dialogue with the workers? How do you generate pride in the choices they make? How do you also lift knowledge from doing something more than just how we’re accustomed to doing it? It’s complicated, but it’s thought-provoking. How do you do that negotiation between the architect and other people? That’s fascinating!

The material is another way of communicating sometimes. For example, I talked to two designers in Vietnam working with bamboo, who were conscious that knowledge is in the workers and wanted to elevate it so that it’s clear that it is not just the architect doing architecture.

We are part of a process that involves many people, and it’s the dynamics of people communicating with each other and making things together that we should lift up as a successful architectural project.

Antonius: But at the end of the day, the architect has to take a stance. What we do is something not everybody can do. We are paid as a professional; we deliver something that is supposed to be perfect or whatever that means is. You’re probably going to jump on this, but sometimes, there’s much, you know, drama involved in the construction process and meetings. At some point, we just have to decide for others.

So maybe this goes back to the context of what culture is. It lasts because people love to maintain it. Our architecture is there to accommodate what people like. Our responsibility is to make life better by employing particular processes, participatory design, and sometimes top-down decisions when people don’t know what they want. When that happens, you have to tell them they probably need to turn to the professional.

Jeffrey: I’d like to talk about our experience building 75 EQFs (Enhanced Quarantine Facilities). Not all are the same because we worked with so many different workers, each with their construction and coping methods. So how do we share values?

Whether it’s by bringing them into the discussion because they are more experienced, we learn while working. So we learn from the workers, and they learn from us. By doing that, they feel empowered. Now we know which way is the fastest, the easiest way to finish the EQF, and that’s what we need—the speed to complete it fast.

I remember William Ti making 100 beds for the PNP (Philippine National Police). There were so many teams—more than a hundred workers. It became something of a competition. We took the strength of each group and encouraged them. We wanted the workers to know they weren’t there merely to do menial tasks but were building what the community needs and should be proud.

Host: Thank you. On to our third question. How is social media changing how we do architecture, and is it shaping the way we design? Let’s start with Antonius this time.

Antonius: What the internet has done for us is increase the inflation of design. Inflation happens not only in the economy. It also occurs in design. Nowadays, people can see so many things and practice with so many materials and technologies that inflate, you know, designs.

I will give you this example because Anthology will be speaking with Sou Fujimoto. Back then, in those years when he did what he did, people were like, “Wow, blow your freakin’ mind!” And then what happened is, nowadays in our practice, we are doing about the same complexity as Fujimoto’s approach, and people are like, “Ah, man, it’s like, it’s easy.” You know, it’s not cool anymore. It’s crazy. And it’s kind of scary how fast we can adapt. Like here, by having this conversation, I probably will learn from everyone, then I will raise my standard, level up, and I’ll try to compete with them on my next project. So social media is increasing the maturity of designers and the way we practice. I’d like to see how it impacts the built environment in the next few years.

Kath: For us, there are two things—awareness and being globally competitive. Social media makes us aware that there’s a technology we can apply our learning we can use. For example, we’re developing bamboo architecture, and whenever we test it, we always share what we do. We get many responses from people interested in what we’re doing, pushing other people to do bamboo.

Antonius, I agree it’s overwhelming that every few minutes, a new Archdaily or Architizer story is showing new technology or innovations in architecture that we don’t know what to apply. It’s happening too fast but in a good way. Social media is like being at a conference table and sharing what we have to offer. And just hearing other people share theirs as well affects us all in a good way.

Host: Matt might have a different perspective since Matt doesn’t have a social media account. So he’s isolated from all of these things.

Audrey: I will just add on to what Antonius and Kath have said. Social media has made design accessible. I think of social media as that “third place,” meaning where people can gather that enables even users to appreciate what good design is. So people are becoming more aware of what they deserve in their living spaces and what they deserve in their communities. They’re coming to realize they should have community spaces, a need the pandemic underscored—the importance of open public spaces. And that’s something that people are starting to learn—that public areas are critical to making cities work. And that those types of spaces should be accessible to and from each other, from your houses, from your communities, because you want to be able to breathe and you need distancing, which you can only get in large, open spaces. How about you, Matt?

Matthieu: I won’t disagree with what all of you have shared. I understand how social media has an enabling power. But from my end, I see social media mostly as a hindrance and an overload. It shows people everything, making people think less about what they should think about. And this creates buildings that are copycats that, you know, go against their contexts just because people want to have something like they saw on Instagram.

Of course, if you want to use social media for inspiration, go ahead. But I think you should have this layer or filter of understanding and pause to reflect on what you want and whether they will make life better for you and others. In this case, social media could be helpful in many ways.

In my case, I prefer to stay in my cave. And when I go out, I’d just talk to people in the streets, people who might not use social media, people anywhere and everywhere—just creating this conversation with everyone because social media does not represent everyone.

Audrey: I think what Matt is saying is we lose that level of discernment when we don’t apply critical thinking in our consumption of content on social media. He’s also speaking from his experience with a client who would bring up anything he finds on Pinterest and then tell him to copy it.

Relationship with context is critical. And I think that’s easily forgotten. Not that social media can’t convey it, but the connection to context is something one must reflect on, which most people do not do. Just show them something they like, then they want the same thing. So we need to figure out a way for social media to be more helpful. Not just how can I copy this design, but what are the things that work in this project, and how do they translate in this new context?

Antonius: Quite interesting. Do you know what you’re saying? There might be some random kids in a corner of Indonesia who get inspired by your project, so of course, there might be another downside. And I dislike the client that brings Pinterest to you. I just ignore them, then it’s an elimination process.

You raise a good point. Social media will not go away. COVID accelerated the use of digital communication so fast. How can we adapt and derive the positive out of it because every change will bring disturbance, for sure.

And to be able to appreciate good design and architecture, isn’t that a good thing? How about inclusivity? Probably a good topic to discuss at another time, but inclusivity is good, right? Perhaps the internet has brought architecture down from its high horse, from something exclusive into something accessible by anybody through the internet. However, it might not be appropriate to their context. If it were that easy, everyone would be an architect, right? But I would like to think your projects might inspire people out there, and that’s a good thing.

William: Social media tends to portray an idealized version of the world, making people believe everything—our faces, bodies, food, and homes—should be perfect. Couple that with all of us trapped where we are because of the pandemic and, we may be looking at the next generation of architects growing up with less travel in their lives. What effect would an idealized and Photoshopped version of the world have on architecture?

Matthieu: Again, I’m not rejecting the advantages of social media. We are a team. I bring my set of skills and knowledge, and Audrey brings her set of skills and knowledge, and she likes more social media than I do.

I like to be in my cave and design. And perhaps it’s the difference in Audrey’s and my exposure to the world that cause our ideas to clash. But resolving these clashes results in a more amazing project.

As Antonius was saying, social media makes sharing of ideas more inclusive. But it could still, in a way, be exclusive. Many more people have to have access to the internet. Some could be living in a country where social media is banned.

Of course, it’s great that people can find and discover things happening worldwide without leaving their homes. But architects need to be careful how we use these tools in our designs and how we want to shape the future.

As for this idealized version of the world, it won’t be easy to get away from that. We were talking about the process of building buildings. But the building doesn’t stop when construction is complete, right. That’s when it starts—allowing people to use the building and appropriate the spaces and make them their own.

Aris: Regarding how we present architecture, many architects favor perfection and post renderings on social media because renderings display a perfect image of the design. The expectation of perfection on social media also demands that photographers produce perfect pictures of the architecture.

On our social media feeds, though, we tend not to post renderings. We prefer more mundane images—photographs of the construction, plants, uh, weird stuff. We don’t present architecture as perfection because it makes our jobs harder to beat that expectation.

So sometimes we’re reluctant to present renderings, but because clients tell me they want this kind of rendering, we say, “Yes, we can do that. But, uh, we’re not sure if your building will come out exactly that way.” So it can be cause for tension.

But the good thing about social media is sometimes you see the merging of the physical and virtual. Based on what they see on social media, people acquire an initial conception of a place and the architecture before even getting to that place.

In addition, we designers of buildings could use that real-time feedback from social media to make better buildings. Not to mention, before, we had to do polls, surveys, post-occupancy studies. Now we can do post-occupancy surveys with videos, just simply looking up or even experiencing the building in virtual reality. So there are negatives and positives in the use of social media and digital platforms.

Matthieu: Yeah, just to jump on that, basically it’s a tool, right? It’s up to us to define the best way to use them and how to move forward. Like right now, you have to have social media to communicate with people we can’t see face-to-face. 

Aris: We no longer live in a world of architecture where it only resides on the site. Our building lives on in the world, which unfortunately cannot be preserved in a certain state. For example, people see photos of buildings surrounded by lush vegetation. Then when they go to the site, “Where’s the lush vegetation? It’s all gone!” Because the photo was taken at a time when there was slush vegetation.

Sometimes people are surprised by electric wires running across the front of the building. They didn’t see it on social media, maybe because they erased the wires with Photoshop. And sometimes our clients say, “Why do you render the electric posts?” And I tell them, “Because they are there.” If they don’t want to see the posts in the rendering, I remind the clients to imagine the spaghetti of wires hanging from the electric poles.

Social media does have this effect, but in the past months, we’ve been discussing how we would leverage social media more productively. We don’t have the answer yet, but everything that we do is a data point. Buildings are data points that will soon generate (and in some cities are already generating) real-time data. Just imagine a building that could adjust itself based on the data that it’s getting from the occupants themselves! It’s the next thing in building smarter buildings—a building based on social information it gets from its occupants and adjusts itself in real-time. So that could be one use of social media.

But of course, surveillance is a different matter. That would be an issue.

Jeffrey: Yeah. We are using social media right now, right?

Aris: Yes. We’re on Zoom and streaming live on Facebook.

Alexander: The question is, what is the framework that social media creates for that communication to happen? What are the algorithms deciding the premises of the conversation? Who decides who gets access to what? There’s a fascination with social media and what that’s managed to distribute. Still, it’s hard to know who it is distributed to, who is receiving what, and being polarized. The tool has good and bad sides, but the tool’s premises were decided by someone else. That’s something we need to kind of question.

The other thing is you’ve got to have two-way communication. I like the format of this teleconference, for example, where we can say something, and we can respond, and we have to stand up for what we say because there is a commitment to a conversation. In contrast, social media in itself doesn’t always have that two-way conversation. You might get a response to something you post, but you can also ignore it.

Jeffrey: Another good way to use social media is to draw people into the design process to feel they are part of it. We use social media to open conversations about the design. Everyone can contribute to the discussion. Do you like this or not? Why? Social media could allow us to interact with the users of public spaces, government buildings, or infrastructure. I agree; it’s up to us to use the tools in a good way.

Host: That’s a great point. Use social media to engage the community. But at the end of the day, architecture is experiential. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. Let’s close the dialogue with the last words from each of our panelists. What advice do you have for the next generation of architects?

Kath: Our advice is, don’t be afraid to ask and explore things that are not established. Explore where others have not yet gone. Standards and rules are there to guide initially. Embrace trial and error in the process, make mistakes, and learn from them.

Christian: Yeah. That’s one mindset we always impart to people with whom we work. Mistakes are okay. It’s what you do after that matters. If you commit an error, fix it. Improve on it. Those mistakes may eventually lead to innovative developments.

Audrey: Matt and I agree that for next-gen architects, it’s important you continue your learning. Consider another degree and exploring new skills. You’re not done because you got your bachelor’s degree or your license. Life is all about learning. You have to continue learning different things and exploring what you want to do because architecture covers a wide field. Speaking from my own experience, I enjoy bringing in my background in architecture to the master plans I do for our projects.

Matthieu: The first thing I would say to the new generation is to dream. You have to do better than whatever we did here. You have to learn from whatever we are doing and do better than us, the same way we learned from generations before. So dream big. And as Kath and Christian were saying, try things and experiment. You can start small, but bring your ideas in defining what you want to do and go from there.

Aris: That’s like a miss universe question. The younger generations should not repeat the mistakes we made. I agree with Matt on that. Learn from the good and bad things we’ve done. The things we failed to do. Question everything, even the standards we set. Always ask, is there a better way we can do things?

Alexander: Thank you so much for the discussion. I enjoy this back and forth and hearing what you guys are doing. It was interesting to see other strands and points we have in common that should be discussed more. To young architects—be part of discussing what you do with other practitioners and with people outside your practice.

Antonius: I would like to thank everyone. This was amazing. I would like to know more about you and your works. I have to say it, this was amazing. I would like to close with this: We have to use our common sense because it doesn’t mean that when you’re licensed, you’re always right.

Jeffrey: Always ask three things—what, how, and why—about your architecture. I agree with Matthieu—dream, and act. Don’t dream and do nothing. Dream and do. And keep asking yourself why you’re doing this. •

Kanto.com.ph is a proud co-presenter of Anthology Festival 2021. This transcript was produced in support of the Festival and its organizers, WTA Architecture and Design.