Areté: Ateneo builds a playground for creativity

Coco Alcuaz

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Areté: Ateneo builds a playground for creativity
Can a striking new building boost Ateneo's bid to make its students and the country more competitive in the tech and information race?

MANILA, Philippines – There’s an unusual building nearing completion just as you enter Gate 3 of Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City.

One wing of the building is, to use the words of Ateneo president Fr Jett Villarin, “curvilinear” – looking like a grand piano or amoeba, or even a fidget spinner. This side will house a new, larger gallery for Ateneo’s rich art collection, as well as a proper theater. This wing and these disciplines represent fluidity and intuition, says Fr Jett.

The other side’s “rectilinear” design reflects logic and structure. This “innovation wing” will house a “sandbox” and other out-of-the ordinary learning spaces (with non-rectangular desks) and dance studios (with shock-absorbent floors).

The project is named Areté, a Greek word for excellence.

The idea is to throw together people from business, science, and engineering, the social sciences, humanities, and the arts. The hope is this will take creativity to a new level at a time when the information and technology economy is making creativity increasingly essential and valuable for graduates and the country.

Listening to Fr Jett and Areté director Yael Buencamino talk about it, and walking around and inside the project, reminded me of some buildings and ideas Tim Harford, better known as the “Undercover Economist,” put in his book “Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives.”

His favorite structure is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Building 20.

Unlike Areté, Building 20 was a boxy 3-storey structure built in 1943. Imagine an “E” with an extra arm. It was “designed in an afternoon” and built in a matter of months to house a radar lab for the war effort. Harford says in the next two years, one-fifth of the country’s physicists worked there and 9 Nobel prize winners emerged, all producing all sorts of radars.

Meant to be a temporary structure and set for demolition, Building 20 got a reprieve when the GI Bill flooded campuses with ex-soldiers. Over the next 50 years, Harford says the building housed projects that produced particle accelerators, video games, some of the first internet networks and email systems, Bose speakers (by Dr Bose himself) and Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC, one of the first big computer companies. Scientists and scholars also produced work on cognitive science, linguistics (by Noam Chomsky, no less), and other fields.

Harford says the building’s design forced, allowed, or encouraged people to interact. Planned accidents, he says. But, “more important, the combination of people who could have those conversations was strange and wonderful.” Nuclear scientists and guided missile experts, people working on plastics, adhesives, electronics, lighting design, and data processing. Machine shops, photo, anthropology, and solar car labs.

Playground

The “sandbox” room may be Areté’s signature. Right now, it’s just the empty, undivided third floor of the innovation wing. But Fr Jett envisions projects taking residency there, benefiting from others in the room and the building.

“The sandbox is a playground,” Fr Jett says on Rappler’s “What’s the Big Idea?” interview series. “If you go there, you’ll see a warehouse with no boundaries, really. So it’s where we hope to have groups come together from different departments and also beyond the school, so that they can actually work on ‘wicked problems.’ But not just solving problems, they might also just want to play, and in fact much of discovery comes from the spirit of play, from wonder.”

That sounds like the “flexible attention” that Harford says is practiced at 3M, the makers of Scotch Tape, Post-its, and 50,000 other products.

“In 3M it means playing a game, taking a nap, or going for a walk across an extensive campus to admire the deer. 3M knows that creative ideas don’t always surrender to a frontal assault. Sometimes they sneak up on us while we are paying attention to something else.”

Neither Areté nor Ateneo can promise deer. But they do promise more outdoor sculptures, and art and plays and music and dance.

“The added value here is the presence, the closer presence, the proximity of the arts and culture, and that’s the new thing here,” Fr Jett says. “We think that if you have this interlocking, or interweave of disciplines, and in an ambiance of culture and the arts, I think we can create new stuff.”

I kidded Fr Jett about the cost of such an iconic and metaphorical building. It was a challenge to fund, a campaign Fr Jett says Debbie Tan, the corporate executive slash godmother to the Ateneo basketball team and young Jesuits, was CKO of: “chief kulit officer.” Now it’s in the hands of Yael Buencamino, promoted from managing curator of the art gallery to director of the whole center, who is delivering a soft opening this week and targeting a full opening in February.

Tim Harford has a caveat for them. He says spaces like Building 20 and Pixar headquarters worked because they were “messy,” where users went as far as literally breaking walls and floors to conduct experiments. Sleek, futuristic structures such as a Frank Gehry-designed ad agency, meanwhile, could result in falling productivity for reasons as simple as there being “no damn place to sit.”

Areté’s striking looks will only go so far in inspiring creativity. Ultimately, it is the people who are invited or allowed to work there – and who stay because they’re allowed to break walls and have accidents – that will give Ateneo a chance to spark a smidgen of the creativity that came from a structure as uninspired, in name and design, as Building 20. – Rappler.com

Coco Alcuaz is a former Bloomberg News bureau chief and ANC business news head and anchor. He now hosts Rappler’s “What’s the Big Idea?” interview series. Reach him on Twitter at @cocoalcuaz.

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