‘Postcards From the Future’

WHEN I was beginning my career as an architect and urban planner, I had the opportunity to travel around the world and observe on the best practices of successful cities. This was one of the perks of being name-hired by the government of Dubai. The rulers of Dubai wanted us to get inspirations from the most progressive cities and learn from their best practices as well as mistakes made, which was my first exposure to benchmarking.

Now that I have been in the architecture and urban planning professions for more than 44 years, I continue to look at the evolution and progress of key cities around the world and attempt to appropriately adopt their development strategies, visions, and plans in our projects here in the Philippines and 38 other countries. Our architects, planners, engineers, designers, and staffers also make it a point to take pictures of the “uglification” of our cities and then re-imagine these images into beautiful and more functional places for people which we call “Postcards From the Future.”