UPDATE (06/29/13): Some have said whatever he does it is OK if it is his money. Well, Unit Owners in some of the Century Properties buildings would like to show where the money came from with tours free of charge. While viewing the construction comments on management control and the original purchase price and what was delivered will be discussed as well as the current selling prices. Then a better idea as to the origin of the money may be discovered.
Pathetic is among the first impressions. For buyers and unit owners of Century
Properties condos, I would think they as I focus on egomaniac and then think to megalomaniac,
after all, six of one half dozen of the other.
Ryan had placed the article on facebook and one person said
they did not know whether to laugh or pity him.
All others replied that no pity was deserved only laughter. The sad and pathetic deserves laughter.
At the link you may view the works of pathos with the
article below.
“The Museum of Me”
“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,” 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.”
