Architect with a Personal Touch
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Residential project in Punta Fuego, Batangas
Sy's story is a blueprint for success attained through a strict code of professionalism, open communication, and the clientele loyalty that such diligence and interpersonal skills foster. While early in her career she might have had solid ideas of the kind of firm she wanted to set up and the caliber of people it would serve, the initial steps in asserting her credibility and the eventual rise in her stature were largely serendipitous. When explaining how she got her first clients, Sy has one word, "Luck."
Luck had presented itself in the form of a Filipino-Chinese businessman who approached C/S Architecture during its infancy in Los Angeles. Sy has no recollection of how he got wind of C/S Architecture, only that he had one singular purpose -- for a Filipino architect to erect a rental housing compound in Singapore. She was up against a handful of other Filipino architects, and her designs so impressed him that he selected her. Both she and Chai saw this as an opportunity to tap into the Philippine market; hence, the birth of C/S Design Consultancy in Manila.
Anna Sy
Due to an economic crisis, the businessman halted the Singapore project. However, luck once again intervened when, on vacation in Myanmar, Sy engaged in conversation with a married Filipino couple who "miraculously" entrusted her to build a beach house. The relationship she developed with them flourished, and over the years, they have commissioned her to construct four other homes. Their patronage gave her a visibility that would spawn a list of clients that continues to grow.
If there is a secret to the steady success of the C/S brand, Sy admits that she has yet to discover it: "That's a bit of a mystery to me because we don't really market. We don't go out there and advertise in an active way. It's always been through word of mouth."
That hers is a small firm is perhaps the reason for its standing as one of the best in the Philippines. Sy is involved in every project, overseeing each aspect of its realization from design to the literal nuts and bolts of the construction process. Her personal touch is antithetical to the working model of a large firm, which consigns projects to junior architects without supervision. Sy also stresses that, in terms of design, she shuns the use of a template to be used on a mass production level; rather, she is in constant dialogue with a client so that together they can conceptualize a design that is conducive to the client's lifestyle: "It's not a business of designing. It's really caring about the design. And I think clients see that."
Reflecting on the 26 years of C/S Design Consultancy, Sy has witnessed a growth in architecture from a myopic trend in Mediterranean-inspired homes and buildings to an enormous eclecticism of structural styles now accessible on the internet. She describes her own aesthetic philosophy as "modernist"; this largely due to her education at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where at the age of 22, she was the first Filipino woman accepted into the program. Of the masters she studied, Mies van der Rohe impacted her the most: "The continuity between interior and exterior spaces, the way he uses very, very controlled elements to make that work, the way the spaces flow into each other and are done in a very, very masterful and controlled way… that's really what excites me [about his architecture], and that's still what guides me whenever possible."
De La Salle University-Rufino Campus in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig
A challenge Sy embraces with every project is applying her western training to a tropical landscape. This demands not only ingenuity, but also compromise, for a client might not understand both the artistic and practical reasons to a direction she has chosen to take. Meanwhile, contractors and engineers could impose their own roadblocks. Herein lies the truth about architecture, that it is an occupation of customer satisfaction more than it is an art: "The creative part is maybe 10-20 percent of that process. The 80 percent is having the patience to wade through the water in order to make it happen. And when it does happen, the final design may not be as pure as your original intention. So, you have to have the patience to pursue this, and the only way you can have that is if you feel in your heart that this is really, really what you want to do."
Anna Sy's passion for architecture started when, as a girl, she'd be overcome by a "sensitive feeling" for residential designs that spoke to her. As Sy learned to give form to a feeling, she perceived a building to be a monument erected to honor its creator. Years of experience and wisdom have tempered her idealism, though her sense of purpose remains as powerful as ever: "I'm not that egotistical anymore. I believe that what you construct is pretty permanent and that's an unbelievable thing. But because what you construct is permanent, there's a lot of responsibility that goes behind that. It influences the way people live, the way they use the space, the way it affects them. For me, it's not a monument. It's more of a remembrance of a creation that's there to actually impact the way people live in a very positive way."
Main lobby of the Net Park Building in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig
C/S Architecture-C/S Design Consultancy
www.csarchitecture.com
Rafaelito Sy
Rafaelito V. Sy is the brother of Anna Sy and the author of Potato Queen, a novel about the relationship between Caucasians and Asians in the San Francisco gay community of the 1990s. Please visit his blog of short stories and inspirational essays on film: www.rafsy.com
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