Words Patrick Kasingsing
Images Yani Pasion and Barchan + Architecture
Filling in the sandbox
One, a streamlined sweep of curves and diagonals in white, the other, a deconstructivist growth bursting out of the earth clad in faceted wooden louvers. The clubhouses of Luscara and Soliento, two landed developments by Ayala Land Premier (ALP), couldn’t have been more different if we were to end our discussion on form alone, but we are talking about two creations by the 20-year-old practice formerly known as Buensalido + Architects, founded by architect Jason Buensalido.
It is easy for a bystander to end one’s reading of a Buensalido project with its often-fanciful geometries or sculptural intent. But having known Jason Buensalido for a while, every fold and seemingly self-indulgent curve is an evocation of the project’s genius. Fan or not, a Buensalido building always has an earnest narrative ready, a personality and clear parti to show off if you care to listen. This makes the brand’s 2024 transition to its sand dune-inspired moniker, Barchan + Architecture, less of a rebranding and more of an evolution.
A barchan is a crescent-shaped sand dune, a granular mass in constant motion and evolution, reshaping itself against insistent winds but without losing its core. “We try to champion progressive excellence in our work,” Buensalido shares in a conversation with Kanto. “Innovation is well and good, but we feel it can be more effectively applied organically or in phases. Not a singular, jarring jolt, but a paced, context-driven evolution that improves with every stage of growth.”
Nowhere is this ethos more evident than in their aforementioned clubhouse projects in Nuvali, Calamba, Laguna. Designed over a decade ago and finding full realization in the past two years, Luscara and Soliento are the built manifestos for both designer and client. In line with the greater Nuvali development’s active, wellness- and sustainability-centric identity, the two neighboring subdivisions share the same green features: bounteous open space on each street, lush, green corridors, and unobstructed views of resplendent Mount Makiling. For Barchan, it was a chance to put their design philosophy to work; the Makati-based practice now has a larger sandbox and a storied line to uphold, with the two developments coming in the wake of previous ALP projects in Nuvali that have set the bar high in eco-conscious placemaking.
Luscara
Playing with light
The Luscara Clubhouse, designed in 2013, was Barchan + Architecture’s first dance with ALP, the most prestigious division of property developer Ayala Land. When onboarded for the project, the 50-ha development’s name and branding were already set; Luscara was to be a community that revels in the illumination and inspiration that an abundance of light brings.
For Barchan, the challenge was to conceptually process this buoyant-light messaging into architecture, to portray light beyond its innate power to illuminate, and as Jason puts it, “…an expression of hope, optimism, and an abundance of life.”
As the practice studied the site in search of the optimum clubhouse location, an uncomfortable fact surfaced. The only plausible lot that satisfied ALP and Barchan’s laundry list of priorities was a 3.8-hectare site that presented a gauntlet of constraints—the building floor area itself clocks in at 3,600 square meters. In a subdivision where residential lots average 700 to 1,000 square meters, the clubhouse lot was a narrow, irregularly shaped property devoid of right angles. The site was further complicated by slightly rolling terrain, existing trees, and a steep ravine on one side. Per the plan and building code, the plot was further limited by a 20-meter easement and a 12-meter road right-of-way (RROW) spanning the entire length of the property.
The steep site requirements meant the program had to be inserted into a long sliver of land, which Barchan divided into three smaller parts to reduce the scale, creating three separate drop-offs. It also had to be low-slung and porous to preserve Mt. Makiling’s sightlines and existing green view corridors. Lastly, as the first structure in a planned community in its infancy, the clubhouse must embody the district character ascribed by the developer, with the hope that its design ethos of tropicality, context-driven simplicity, and restraint would positively influence the design of future homes within Luscara.
Ahead of the curve
“Nature is curved,” Jason shares. “Nothing is orthogonal about nature. Why do we insist on perfection and orthogonality when natural organisms move with asymmetry and unpredictability?”
For Luscara’s clubhouse, Barchan embraced its role as design emissary between the realms of man and nature with gusto, taking inspiration from the site’s rolling terrain and reconciling it with the permeable severity of Miesian modernism.
The resulting single-level structure is low-slung and dynamic in form, almost as if it were frozen in motion. It leveraged the lightness and implied motion of its curved, organic, free-flowing form, its wind-swept profile defined by a strong horizontal roofline, with a façade finished in a cocktail of concrete, glass, and wood. “Our translation of light as architectural form has led to a space that is almost diaphanous in its porosity, its spare lines and dramatic sweeps implying lightness, rooted into the earth by diagonal walls as graphical connectors,” Jason explains.
The porosity ensures the “abundance of light” branding is felt throughout the spaces as maaliwalas, the uniquely Filipino concept of abundant space, cross-ventilation, and unmediated access to nature and light. This buoyancy and natural openness are further emphasized by the availability of garden atria and pocket landscaping, including a small pocket garden at the heart of the social hall wing and a large central lawn at the heart of the entire structure, all stitched together by an open colonnade of angled pillars that supports the layered roofing. This move keeps vistas at either end of the parcel clear, while the 2m-wide roof overhangs provide ample shade and rain protection for guests below.
“Our translation of light as architectural form has led to a space that is almost diaphanous in its porosity, its spare lines and dramatic sweeps implying lightness, rooted into the earth by diagonal walls as graphical connectors.”
The program and intensity of use yielded two clubhouse volumes united by overlapping roofs; the Social Zone houses the multi-purpose hall, pantries, and guest toilets, while the Active Zone houses the community basketball court—embedded into the ground to minimize the height of the required volume—along with a fitness gym and indoor playground. The smaller Service Zone is where the community’s nerve center is located, with HOA offices and administrative, storage, and utility areas. A rectilinear 25-meter pool (excluding the kiddie and wading pools) is the geometric foil to the sinuous volumes of the clubhouse, a refreshing addition that favors the creek-facing ravine on the site, creating an infinity-pool effect.
Spatial anchor
It’s been a decade since Luscara’s conception, and based on recent site photos, the clubhouse has aged admirably, its simple, aerodynamic form proving the perfect complement to the natural entropy of the surrounding greens. It retains its role as an architectural primer for future homeowners, a charge that appears to have informed the clean simplicity of the single built home just across and around it. “It is always a nerve-wracking wait to see what design or forms are influenced by the pioneering structure we build on a subdivision or a site,” Jason admits, “but that’s the reality of evolution; it is unpredictable, but also exciting.”
Soliento
One with the wind and sun
Luscara’s sibling subdivision, the 66-ha Soliento, lies just across the road from the development; it comes right on the heels of the 2013 clubhouse, with Barchan nabbing the assignment in 2014. Like its sibling community, Soliento already had a pre-ordained persona. The subdivision name is a portmanteau of the Spanish sol (sun) and viento (wind), and while it conjures an idyllic image in the developer’s eye, Barchan saw in its pairing nature’s duality as both nurturer and destroyer, with sun and wind bringing light and comfort, but also excessive heat and destructive typhoons, a contradiction that proved ripe for formal experimentation.
Soliento form-finding Soliento site diagram
The site planning of Soliento is an enhancement on Luscara’s already idyllic greenscapes; the courtyard parks on each cluster have grown by more than 200%—from an average of roughly 2.5 basketball courts per courtyard in Luscara, to 8 basketball courts in Soliento—while overall green space has climbed to approximately 50% of the total site area, thanks to a sprawling green belt that cleaves the subdivision in two.
Like its sibling, the search for the clubhouse’s plot was a chess game with its own pros and cons; the eventual site chosen was a triangular plot straddling the terminus of the green belt, with residential plots just across, yielding a 2,280-square-meter clubhouse. “Soliento’s challenges and persona are different from Luscara, but it was vital for us to keep that sibling DNA intact as sister developments. We carried over learnings from Luscara concerning programmatic spread and sightline preservation into Soliento but evolved its structural envelope considerably,” Jason reveals.
The plurality Barchan derived from the subdivision’s name was the jump-off point for the form. “For Luscara, we looked to the sky and went with grounded flight,” Jason shares. “For Soliento, we looked to the earth and the concept of sheltered warmth.”
Soliento can be said to be the less-conventional-looking of the two sibling clubhouses, and the most dramatic. It is an architectural Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (without the villainy, of course): a modern, deconstructivist face of tessellated wooden louvers faces the main road and approach, while a simpler, ranch-like, veranda-wrapped façade favors the surrounding lawns, landscape, and pools.
The wooden louvers, beyond visual garnish, work just as hard, uniting multiple programs under its cloak, serving as breaker for excess sun and wind, while also hiding the utilitarian aspects of the building. The ranch-style façade, on the other hand, is no generic resort architecture in any way, with a dramatic cantilevered roof supported by toothpick-thin supports favoring the pool.
While the Luscara clubhouse embraces its nature as a man-made object, Soliento dabbles with attempts at natural mimicry, hugging the ground and resembling an earthen mound. The clubhouse even accommodates a rotunda that wraps around a preserved existing tree. Its two-faced design also allows another contradiction to play out: a structure that both sinks into the background and jumps to the forefront depending on where you look.
Don’t hate; reiterate!
“One constant thing in design is iteration,” Jason ponders. “The first design is rarely the final one; as much as iteration involves changing form and tact to answer a problem, it also means every iteration is a better version of the last. I think it’s a healthy attitude to have as a designer: to always keep aiming higher than your last.”
While different in formal language and contextual nuance, Soliento and Luscara both carry similar job orders: to foster a sense of camaraderie and to provide a design template for future communities to draw from. The journeys of these sibling developments put Barchan’s tenet of progressive innovation through its paces, as the design evolved and streamlined in response to cost concerns, a pandemic, and changing market values. In the end, both stand as Barchan’s best possible solutions at that point in time. Opinions naturally differ when form is the topic of discussion, but good design is objective and adaptive to unpredictability. By emulating the way nature evolves to increase resilience and survival, Barchan + Architecture’s real achievement in its two clubhouses is to encode a system of informed iteration and self-improvement, a foundational grain vital to the success of a budding community. •
