The post-modern, post-structuralist, or post-colonial period (depending on the reader’s interpretation of periodization) we live in is now dominated by tendencies in the Age of Aquarius – earth-bound, spiritual, feminine.

This is perhaps the reason behind the recent blending of forms in the coined phrase “art-chitecture” that emphasizes art in the emergent edifices flowering all over the Philippines.

A quick look at online data reveals that the concept of “art-chitecture” dates back to the early ‘80s but utilizes architectural or building materials to form art or what can be called in painting as mixed media or in pop culture as installation art.

Further back, some practitioners of “art-chitecture” trace its roots to the Art Deco movement in the 1930’s where there was a persistent desire among artists to modify the products of Renaissance.

On the other hand, “art-chitecture” can also put emphasis on “chitecture” where the focus of artistic modification are the buildings themselves. One architect even went as far as dotting a subdivision with individual houses that look like spaceships. The architectural design was called futuristic, owing perhaps to the popular film Extra Terrestial (E.T.), but properly belongs now to the category of “art-chitecture”.

From mixed media and installation art to art deco and futuristic designs, the current trend in design is lined with earth-bound, spiritual and feminine elements.

A practitioner of this concept defines his vocation, thus: “Artchitecture is based in the new valuation of a concept that embraces the principles of Oscar Niemeyer’s modernism, and other contemporary art movements. It champions the fusion of art and architectural structures organically inserted into the ecosystem that surrounds us, and propitiating a three-dimensional link—work-space-structure.”

In the early ‘90s, I remember reading an article written by a poet-journalist for the sunday magazine of a national daily which characterizes the 21^st century with a “universal convergence of the human spirit.”

The fast-paced development in information technology provides the “universal convergence” where contrasting and even opposing views can be found in the information highway and wars can be waged in the human mind instead of the geographic territories.

These almost invisible microchips are crossing the boundaries of class, gender and ethnicity in an invincible manner though not necessarily unregulated process. In fact, the US government recently penalized Microsoft (US$21M), Yahoo (US$7.5M) and Google (US$3M) for accepting ads from online betting operators. Unscrupulous programmers and petty hackers can also harm information stored in individual internet boxes or corporate libraries.

The “human spirit”, however, is for the artists to ponder on. The advent of “art-chitecture” is one manifestation of an artistic desire to make life inside condominiums as humane as possible. In a sense, the present  crop of architects are well-entrenched in culture and the arts to know that art is not just a piece of poetry or painting that can be framed and hung on one’s wall but the wellspring of one’s humanity.

But what, after all, is “humanity”? An existentialist may say that it is the endless opening and closing of doors in a never-ending hallway. A materialist, on the other hand, may claim that one’s humanity is what produces and reproduces the human being and his environs. The key words are “hu” and “man” where “hu” is being defined lately by practitioners of meditation as the basic utterance that unifies an individual with his god; “man”, meanwhile, is both the biological product of evolution and destiny’s creation.

A discourse on “humanity” may require a doctoral dissertation but for the purposes of “art-chitecture” it is that entity which makes an abode exude life and puts premium on comfort, convenience and style – a direction that blends form with content, material with spiritual, mind with matter, and everything else possible to make this world a better place to live in.