MUSEUM OF ME

by Michelle Parsons

For several years, real estate mogul Robbie Antonio has been working on his DREAM project.  He has spent countless number of hours examining great works of art and studying architecture design to such a degree that his interest and enthusiasm borders on fanaticism.  Aptly named “Obsession”, one part of the project will be an art gallery filled with 35 portraits of Robbie himself.  At a cost as high as $250,000 per painting, the walls will be lined with works by internationally known contemporary artists such as David Salle, Kenny Scharf, and Julian Schnabel.  Now referred to as the “Museum of Me” by the public and media, this gallery will only be ONE room of a 25,000 square foot home that is currently under construction in the Philippines, being designed by world famous Dutch architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas.  Built in an exclusive neighborhood of Manila and at an estimated cost of $15 Million, the home (called the “Stealth” by Robbie) will be a series of boxes stacked together in an irregular pattern with a rooftop pool and waterfall.  

When word of Antonio’s dream project got out, it would be an understatement to say social media lit up.  This is exactly the type of story the public loves to comment on, and almost everyone (but me) seems to have a strong opinion about.  Words such as egomaniac, narcissist, elitist, vain and selfish were used the most often.  Some went so far as to say he is not in touch with reality or part of society, and that he was born with a “silver spoon in his mouth”.  He was also attacked for his business partnerships and friendships with Paris Hilton, LaToya Jackson and Donald Trump.  Some even suggested that he probably avoids paying his taxes and compared him to Imelda Marcus, the former First Lady of the Philippines who allegedly owned 3,000 pairs of shoes.  A small minority, however, defended his right to spend his money anyway he wanted while an even smaller group just described him as simply a “patron of the arts”. 

What interested ME the most about the public’s reaction was that not one of the comments I read was written by anyone who actually knew Robbie.  Yet practically everyone wrote with such certainty, and most were ready to convict him based on the limited facts that were presented.  This made me think of ALL the times I have also jumped to such a  quick conclusion about another, how easy it was for me to “label” someone that I had never met or hardly knew.   I know we are all guilty of this, but what bothers me is that so many people these days are so steadfast in their opinions that it’s impossible for them to be neutral or objective…. and almost no one is capable of giving anyone else the “benefit of a doubt”.  

Although I know next to nothing about Robbie Antonio other than what I reported above, and have no desire to defend him personally, why do we assume that someone who pays $20M+ on his house and art work does not also CONTRIBUTE to society just as much as anyone else?   Why do we judge someone based on the home they live in, the clothes they wear, the cars they drive or the number of charities they support?  In a capitalistic society where there will always be inequities in wealth, what should matter most is NOT how people spend their money but how they treat others.  How many times have we heard of a wealthy person who writes a big check to some charity to impress others (or get rid of guilt) and then goes home and kicks their dog or beats their wife and children?  Whatever good energy was created by his donation has just been cancelled out by how he treated his family.  Is this the type of person we want to applaud and support?  The amount of money someone has (or how they choose to spend it) will never tell the whole story of who they really are behind closed doors.  

Very few of us are capable of being a Mother Teresa, and I personally don’t want to live in a world where everyone was.  We are all here in this world on SEPARATE paths working on different things.  I don’t know what Robbie Antonio is working on in this life, or what his joys or struggles are.  I don’t know if he is a good guy or not.  I just think he should have the freedom and choice to contribute to society in his own way.  If there is a Judgment Day when we are done with this life, I believe that acts of kindness will be given greater weight than dollars contributed.

ONTD ART POST: The Museum of Me

by Oh No They Didn’t

Robbie Antonio’s new house in Manila, designed by renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, will be filled with portraits of himself, by world-class artists such as Julian Schnabel, Marilyn Minter, and David Salle. Is the 36-year-old real-estate developer a patron, an egomaniac, or both?

Ask Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas why he’s taken on his first residential commission in 15 years—scheduled to be completed this month in Manila, the Philippines—and he has a very short answer indeed: “Well, basically Robbie.”

“Robbie” would be Robbie Antonio, a 36-year-old real-estate developer and voracious art collector who has spun a golden web and ensnared some of the world’s top creative names for two eye-poppingly ambitious projects.

The first is the Manila home, which also serves as a museum for his ever expanding art collection, with works by the likes of Damien Hirst, Francis Bacon, and Jeff Koons. The building, by Koolhaas and his team at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), is referred to by the name Antonio gave it, Stealth. Its cost—upwards of $15 million—is in somewhat stark contrast to the average annual Filipino-family income of $4,988. Indeed, the building, under construction on a small lot in Manila’s most exclusive neighborhood, has been kept largely quiet until now. It’s a series of boxes stacked together in an irregular pattern, with scooped-out windows that call to mind Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum, all wrapped in a charcoal-colored concrete-and-polyurethane “skin”; the roof features a pool flowing into a dramatic waterfall.

Antonio calls the second project Obsession: a series of portraits of himself by some of the world’s top contemporary artists, including Julian Schnabel, Marilyn Minter, David Salle, Zhang Huan, members of the Bruce High Quality Foundation, and Takashi Murakami.


So far, two dozen portraits are under way or completed, with nearly $3 million spent on them. Antonio is aiming for 35 in the series by the end of the year, all of which will be housed in a special gallery within Stealth, open only to invited guests. The level of effort he’s put into Obsession and Stealth over the last two years “tells you about my personality—going to extremes, down to the minutest detail,” he says.

The performance artist Marina Abramović, a friend of Antonio’s, who has called him a “volcanic tornado,” is contributing a piece to Obsession that she calls The Chamber of Stillness: a basement room in Stealth with a waterfall view that could actually lock him in for periods of up to 60 minutes and force contemplation. “She thinks I’m super-fast and need to calm down,” says Antonio.

One day in New York this winter, while riding in a town car to Chelsea to see the contents of his art-storage unit, Antonio said out of the blue, “I want to work with five Pritzker winners by the time I’m 45,” referring to the prize awarded annually by the Chicago hotel and real-estate family and the highest honor for architects. In fact, before he gave Koolhaas the green light, he says, he had discussions with the offices of Jean Nouvel, Thom Mayne, and Zaha Hadid, a murderers’ row of Pritzker laureates.

Antonio doesn’t come from a family of collectors. He’s self-educated in the arts and says simply, “I’ve always been interested in art and architecture.” But he thinks in terms of the collecting big leagues. “You see Peter Brant do this for Stephanie Seymour,” he says of his multiple portrait commissions, “but I do it for myself! I want to surpass that.”

The fortune for this unchained ambition comes from Century Properties, the publicly traded real-estate company founded by Antonio’s father, currently valued at around a half-billion dollars, according to Antonio, who manages the day-to-day operations. Most of their projects are in Asia, but Antonio also founded a separate, New York-based company to do developments there—including a collaboration with I. M. Pei on a luxury condominium, the Centurion. The family’s wealth is estimated at $300 million.

Antonio is constantly on the hunt for new Obsession commissions. In March, at New York’s Art Dealers Association of America Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory, he saw a display of Karen Kilimnik’s storybook-style portraits of women. “Does she do men?” he asked the gallery representative. (Kilimnik has not yet been drafted for the Obsession project.)

The artists he has enlisted in this quest seem bemused by Antonio’s aggressive approach but powerless to resist it. “His enthusiasm for all kinds of things is endearing—he kind of pulls you into his orbit,” says painter David Salle, who did a double portrait of Antonio next to Stealth, putting the lord alongside his manor, an updated riff on the Gainsboroughs and Sargents of old.

The Los Angeles-based painter Kenny Scharf portrayed Antonio as “a chic space alien,” (pic on top of the post)
complete with antennae. “We had dinner, I took his picture, and we talked a lot,” says Scharf of getting to know Antonio. “He wanted it immediately, and I told him he couldn’t have it immediately. He was very impatient.

“He’s a good-looking guy, and he obviously likes that part about himself.”

One thing that has helped persuade the artists to participate—beyond the $50,000 to $100,000 that Antonio is paying for each piece—is that he has done his homework. Photographer David LaChapelle recalls that, when Antonio showed up for their first meeting in Los Angeles, “he had a book of mine with literally thousands of Post-it notes.” Two months later, LaChapelle photographed Antonio against a flamboyant “millionaire’s pinball machine” backdrop.

LaChapelle takes pains to put the Obsession series in perspective. “The tradition of wealthy people wanting portraits of themselves goes back as far as art history,” he says. “It’s very easy for people to criticize him, but the more art, the better. It will be up to him to have a well-rounded project and not just a vanity project. And the collection will set him apart.”

Perhaps. Certainly having a Koolhaas house-museum is a distinction that few can claim. Plenty of people have tried to commission a Koolhaas home, but he says he was waiting for the right client—and the perfect project. “We were desperate to do more houses,” he says. “It is particularly exciting because, if you do a house, inevitably you have to engage with a person. So nothing more intimate exists.”

Somehow, Antonio’s hyper-specificity about what he wanted struck a chord. “Actually, I’m surprised they never kicked me out of their office, because I gave them, like, 50,000 images of what not to do and what to do,” says Antonio.

“Half of them were contradictory to each other,” says Koolhaas of the requested features. “Then we decided to basically not be our normal, occasionally dogmatic self but to completely adopt his point of view and see where it would end.”

Even Antonio’s architectural references were outsize. When it came to the 25,000-square-foot Stealth, he and Koolhaas used the floor plans of the Whitney and the Guggenheim as comparisons.

“It’s an enormous vision,” adds Koolhaas. “We’ve never had somebody with so many things he liked, so many things he wanted.” Originally, Antonio wanted Koolhaas to design a revolving building that would rotate a few times a month. “But I thought that would be detrimental to my budget,” Antonio says. Perhaps the most fantastical element in the finished house is near the bar on the first floor: a circular section of the wall behind it can actually flip open, hinging at the top and leading out onto the garden—giving new meaning to the phrase “man cave.”

Most of all, it was the distinctness of the Obsession project that appealed to Koolhaas, who notes dryly that “in every suburban house you see a Richard Prince Nurse.” Koolhaas says he was attracted by the notion that Antonio was testing “how far you can take patronage, or how far you can get art to represent yourself, or how you can [make] your own reputation through art.”

That was the only vote of confidence the collector needed. “I really went for it,” Antonio adds.

Rest of the art here:

By the Bruce High Quality Foundation.

By Damien Hirst (I’m disappointed that this isn’t a tank of formaldehyde for Robbie to dip himself into when he feels like doing some ~performance art~)

By Takashi Murakami.

By Zhang Huan.

By Julian Opie.

By Julian Schnabel

By Giles Bensimon

PH property developer’s P650-M house featured in US mag

by ABS-CBN News

MANILA, Philippines – Century Properties has made a name for itself in the Philippines with its luxury residential projects, often attached with famous names such as Trump, Versace, Missoni, Starck and even celebrity Paris Hilton.

Now the property developer’s managing director Robbie Antonio is getting attention for having convinced world-famous architect Rem Koolhass to design his 25,000-square-foot house in Manila.

In its July issue, US magazine Vanity Fair came out with an article about Antonio titled “The Museum of Me.”

Vanity Fair said the Koolhaas-designed house, which Antonio called “Stealth”, reportedly costs “upwards of $15 million” (approximately P650 million).

“Indeed, the building, under construction on a small lot in Manila’s most exclusive neighborhood, has been kept largely quiet until now. It’s a series of boxes stacked together in an irregular pattern, with scooped-out windows that call to mind Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum, all wrapped in a charcoal-colored concrete-and-polyurethane ‘skin’; the roof features a pool flowing into a dramatic waterfall,” the magazine reported.

Koolhass was asked why he took on the residential commission, his first in 15 years, and he simply answered, “Well, basically Robbie.” The Dutch architect seemed to have been impressed with Antonio’s “enormous vision.”

“Then we decided to basically not be our normal, occasionally dogmatic self but to completely adopt his point of view and see where it would end,” Koolhaas was quoted as saying.

Koolhaas, who founded The Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), is a Pritzker Prize-winning architect and was named one of Time’s most influential people in 2008. Among his famous works are the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, Casa da Musica in Portugal, Seattle Central Library and Seoul National University Museum of Art.

Antonio had originally wanted Koolhaas to design a building that could be rotated, but he told Vanity Fair it “would be detrimental to my budget.”‘

His house will also have a gallery, where he will display around two dozen of his portraits by some of the world’s top artists such as Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel, David LaChapelle, Julian Opie and Takashi Murakami.

Vanity Fair said Antonio spent $3 million (around P130 million) on these portraits.

Antonio is known to have made valuable connections with celebrities such as the Trumps and Hilton in New York. He has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a degree in Economics from Northwestern University.

He spent 5 years in New York, where he worked on the The Centurion and enlisted the help of Pritzker Prize Award-winning architect I.M. Pei to design it.

Antonio is the son of former Ambassador Jose Antonio, whose wealth is estimated at $300 million and was 25th in Forbes magazine’s Top 40 list of richest people in the Philippines. The family owns listed property developer Century Properties Group, whose projects include luxury condo Essensa in Bonifacio Global City; Trump Tower Manila, Acqua Iguazu by yoo inspired by Starck and Azure Urban Resort Residences, whose beach club was designed by Paris Hilton.

Read More:  Century Properties Group   Vanity Fair   Robbie Antonio  

Robbie Antonio’s Museum Of Me

By Jacque De Borja, Preview PH

The real estate developer’s home in Manila now houses a museum of his own portraits.

Robbie Antonio's Museum Of Me

Real estate developer, Robbie Antonio of Century Properties, was featured in Vanity Fair U.S.s July 2013 issue—for what, you ask?

He revealed that his new home in Manila, designed by renowned architect Rem Koolhas, will feature works of internationally-known artists such as Julian SchnabelMarilyn Minter, and David Salle among others—and their artwork and portraits of, you guessed it, himself.

There’s apparently no disputing that ’90s babies don’t have a monopoly on the “Me-llenial” bug, as this comes hot on the heels of the recent buzzworthy Time feature on the younger generation. The “selfie” trend has been going on throughout the years (think of the Royals and wealthy families who fill their own homes with portraits of themselves!). Robbie took it a step further and continued the centuries-old practice, while at the same time fueling his love for art; he is, after all, an avid collector.

The article reported that he spent $3 million for a total of 12 portraits, but there’s no stopping there. His goal? A total of 35 portraits. 

Till we make our millions, there’s always Instagram!

Photo credit: Vanity Fair, July 2013