Slides That Follow Your Voice: Filipino Accent Commencement Address

Slide 1: Listen to the pencil marks

0:17Good afternoon, graduates, families, faculty, and whoever is holding the umbrella for the dean. [laughs] Thank you for asking me back. Fourteen years ago I sat where you are sitting, in a gown that didn't fit, holding a diploma that said architect, and feeling, if I'm Uh... honest, like a person who had been given the keys to a car she could not yet drive.

Slide 2: Three buildings.

0:45So I won't give you advice about the car. I'll tell you about three buildings, because that is what we do, and because each one taught me something the studio could not. You know, the usual. Three things. I'm sorry, it is always three. [chuckles]

1:02The first is a house in a town I won't name, on a river that floods every year, to a line that the owner, Mrs Dizon, had marked on her kitchen wall in pencil: one point eight metres in a bad year. She hired me, at twenty-six, with no portfolio, because I was cheap and because I asked to see the pencil marks before I asked to see the plot.

Slide 3: The first: a house on a river that floods

1:29We lifted the house onto concrete piers, two point two, sorry, two point four metres high, we put the kitchen upstairs, and the ground floor became a space that is a garage in the dry season and a river in the wet one. It cost eleven percent more than a normal house. It has flooded six times and never once been damaged.

1:53Mrs Dizon still sends me a photograph of the water line every year, and the line is always below the floor, and I keep them all in a folder, and that folder is the best review I have ever had. This year the photograph had her grandson in it, on the stairs, pointing at the water, with a face that said, is this it. He was born in that house. He has never known a wet floor. He has no idea how strange that is. Anyway. It is raining on you now, I can see, so I will move faster. The lesson.

2:33What I learned: the client knows the site. You know the structure. Neither of you knows the building until you've listened to the other.

Slide 4: The client knows the site

2:46The second is a public market roof. three thousand two hundred square metres, bamboo and steel, built for a municipality with a budget that would not have covered the steel alone in a conventional design. We spent eight months on the connection detail, one detail, the uh, the joint where bamboo meets steel, because bamboo shrinks and steel does not, and every engineer we spoke to told us to use concrete.

Slide 5: The second: a public market roof

3:15We didn't. The roof has stood for nine years through four typhoons. The connection detail has been copied, without permission, in at least thirty markets, and I've decided to be honoured, mostly.

3:31One of them is in my own home town. My mother took me to see it. She said, it looks like yours. I said, it is mine. She said, then why is it not on your website. I didn't have an answer. I still don't. She brings it up.

3:51What I learned: spend your time on the joint. Not the form, the joint. Things break where two of them meet, buildings, firms, people, and, anyway, that is another speech.

Slide 6: Spend your time on the joint

4:07Wait, did I do the second one. I did. Okay. The third building I won't describe, because it was never built. We lost the competition to a design that was cheaper and worse, and I spent four months angry about it.

Slide 7: The third: never built

4:24Then I drove past the site, two years later, and the building that was cheaper and worse was full of people, and they were happy, and the market around it had grown, and I understood something I didn't want to understand. [sighs] The city did not need my building. It needed a building. Mine would have been better. Theirs was there, Theirs was there.

Slide 8: You will lose, and the city will go on

4:53What I learned: you will lose, and the city will go on, and that is the correct order of importance.

5:02Graduates, you are entering a profession in a country that will build more in your lifetime than in all the lifetimes before you put together, in a climate that will test every joint you draw. That is the most interesting commission any generation of architects has been handed.

Slide 9: Draw carefully. Listen to the pencil marks.

5:22Draw carefully. Listen to the pencil marks. And hold the umbrella over the dean, not yourself. He is getting wet. I can see it from here. Okay. Congratulations.