From sketchpad to reality: Students create dream campus
What started out as a simple design exercise now stands as the new Rockwell campus of the SoFA Design Institute.
The move, which followed the closing of its campus that straddled Buendia Avenue and Jupiter Street in Makati City, is a homecoming of sorts, with the 14-year-old school having made its launch at the Power Plant Mall back in 2007.
Known as “Blank Canvas,” the 1,000-square meter campus on the second level of The Proscenium Retail Row looks just like, well, a blank canvas with its mostly white walls and black accents. The interior flows like fabric, and the halls loop back around.
“We really wanted it to be a blank canvas because we believe that’s where every creative starts,” said SoFA cofounder and president Amina Aranaz-Alunan. “Every design idea starts from nothing. And from there, it grows and evolves. The blank canvas is also a place to collaborate.”
Architects Kenneth Baltazar and Dana Manimbo, cofounders and coprincipals of Symplex Studios and part-time instructors at SoFA, led a team of 12 interior design students in conceptualizing the look of the new campus. Whoever wanted to join was welcome, which meant the team consisted of a mix of second- and third-year as well as graduating students.
Baltazar and Manimbo saw potential during a workshop they held for their students, so they helped refine the idea for what was supposed to be just a single room.
“We pitched it to the Almarios, and they liked the concept,” said Baltazar, referring to SoFA board members and interior designers Ivy and Cynthia Almario. Before they knew it, the team was already being tasked with designing the entire campus—and they had only three months to compete the concept.
Real world experience
“It was really a good surprise for us, a good challenge. It set the students up for the real world also,” said Manimbo, adding that SoFA’s edge is getting students the opportunity to learn firsthand what it’s like to practice in the real world and experience the whole collaborative process. “The students didn’t really just practice design. They practiced even marketing, sponsorship, construction.”
“They really are the superstars,” said Baltazar. “We’re just technically facilitators, guides.”
(Those 12 students—namely Bernadette Raralio, Ivy Bondoc, Aubrey Madridejos, Pax Carpio, Carmel Azimi, Cha Barretto, Charms Mercado, Toni Constantino, Aki Anicoche, Ritz Beltran, Krice Samson and Cindy Choi—went on to become the founding members of the newly created interior design organization, Society for Empowerment in Education and Design or Seed, which aims to be proactive in terms of emergent possibilities in design.)
“We want everyone who walks into our campus to draw inspiration from the displays, and have the never-ending passion to conceptualize and design,” said interior design student Raralio.
Josefa Labay from the admissions office, who gave a tour of the rooms, said the campus is “meant to evoke that feeling of free-flowing of ideas, meaning that SoFA is the jump-off point for anyone to start their creative journeys.”
She added, “The rooms here were really designed with intentionality, because the ones who designed it were the students and faculty themselves who use these rooms, who walk these halls.”
The looped layout, according to Baltazar, embodies the creative process, which starts with a conversation (Think Tank). “Then you go through the work, the lobby. You do your research, which is the library. You turn and go to all technical stuff, the admin. You turn again: studios. And then it brings you back to conversations again,” he said.
“In a way, it’s a physical manifestation of SoFA’s pedagogy,” which focuses more on introspection, Baltazar added.
