what was the thesis project of architect leandro locsin

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Leandro Valencia Locsin

Filipino architect.

• Jean-Claude Girard
• X / Twitter

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Birkhäuser
• Copyright year: 2022
• Audience: Architekten/-innen, Bauhistoriker/-innen, Studierende
• Main content: 320
• Illustrations: 250
• Coloured Illustrations: 250
• Keywords: tropical modernism ; modernism ; concrete ; Eero Saarinen ; brutalism ; Philippines ; manila ; concrete architecture ; Vernacular architecture ; climate
• Published: December 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9783035620931
• ISBN: 9783035620924

Leandro Valencia Locsin: Philosophy and Ideology

A celebrated Filipino architect, artist, interior designer, and musician Leandro Valencia Locsin (15 August 1928 – 15 November 1994) is one of the most influential brutalist architects in Southeast Asia . Locsin has been an active architect from 1955 to 1994. During his term, He produced 75 residential projects and 88 other buildings, including 11 churches and chapels, 23 public buildings , 48 commercial buildings, six major hotels, and an airport terminal building. In 1990, the late Philippine President, Corazon C. Aquino declared him a National Artist in the field of Architecture.

Here are the varied philosophies and ideologies of Leandro Locsin evident in his architecture:

1) Creating New Filipino Architecture | Leandro Locsin

Since his childhood, Leandro Locsin has been a part of a culturally rich environment that made him aware of the forms and spaces of Spanish- period Filipino architecture, the bipolar qualities of which are apparent in his work. Locsin has a style of architecture that has been attributed to having a distinct and profound Filipino character. He developed the then-contemporary architecture in the Philippines by studying various facets like archaeology, history, folk architecture, music and Philippine modern art. 

These talents of Locsin display beauty in his forms and its appearance that reshapes the urban landscape. He met some of his influences like Paul Rudolph and Eero Saarinen when he visited the United States . Before Locsin contributed to architecture in the Philippines, western architecture was considered the symbol of modernity, sophistication, order, and power, and regarded locally-produced buildings as old- fashioned as well as provincial. With Locsin, modern architecture came to be known as an amalgam of East and West. He established an architectural identity by the use of monumental and bold forms in his architecture. 

Every building that Leandro Locsin designed adopts climatic features of Southeast Asia along with the traditional style of the Philippines. He studied the vernacular philippine traditions merged with the modern architecture that defines his work to emerge of a new contemporary Filipino architecture. Some of Leandro Locsin’s notable works are the Cultural Center of the Philippine, Diliman Church of the Holy Sacrifice, the University of the Philippines, the Philippine International Convention Center, the Sofitel Philippine Plaza Hotel, the Manila Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 1, and the Philippine Stock Exchange Building.

2) Poet of Architectural Space

Leandro Locsin articulated every space using geometry so straightforwardly and came to be called the ‘Poet of Space’. He is known for creating a distinct style by using simplistic design, floating volumes, and the use of duality of light and heavy. Along with this, Locsin is also famous for using concrete as it was a relatively cheaper material and easy to form in the Philippines. 

A few of design principles of Locsin are the use of native materials, the dominant form of the roof, wide overhanging eaves, having massive supports, spacious interiors with lattices, trellises, and various ornamental details. He understands the poetry of the space by giving great attention to the sense of place, abstraction, symmetry, proportion, and materiality linked to the use of concrete and traditional materials. Locsin also focuses on Filipino architecture as a synthesis and reflection of the people’s aspirations, traditions, culture, economic resources, technology , environment, climate, and all other components of Philippine society.

3) Bipolar Architecture | Leandro Locsin

Leandro Locsin brought art into his architecture , and along with his forms and spaces, he attempted to re-introduce the architectural experience of a building. The Philippines has a hybrid culture that produces new forms and harnesses the bipolarity to communicate architecture. In 1957, this lightness was visible in the design of Monterrey Apartments by incorporating bipolar elements in both exterior and interior space. 

Locsin harmoniously tried to blur the boundaries of modern architecture into the climate of Southeast Asia. Throughout the year, the Philippines has high temperature and high humidity because of its location near a volcanic zone. Subsequently, Locsin produced durable architecture with open and vast spaces for ventilation . With this bipolarity, He brought the western influences that are now deep-rooted with the traditional Filipino architecture.

Leandro Locsin interprets an understanding of traditional forms and the processes involved to produce them, which is very different from the other Filipino architects. The influence of Locsin is undeniable by the use of bipolarity to express Filipino principles in his design and architecture. He used the concept of bipolarity in his dynamic architectural forms and spaces. 

The following manifestations emerged on understanding his philosophy and ideology for the bipolarity in architecture: 

i) Floating effect

Leandro Locsin created the floating effect in his works by using the vernacular forms and human integration in a traditional house on stilts. 

Reminiscent of the traditional houses, Locsin gave importance to the upper floors where the ground floor is used, as storage. This floating effect emphasizes the entrance to the buildings and the process of ascending. The Church of the Holy Sacrifice (1957), the CCP Theater of Performing Arts (1966), Alfredo Luz’s Magsaysay Center (1967), and Jose Zaragosa’s Meralco Building (1968) are some of the examples that showcase this effect.

The floating quality makes the building appear to be levitating as well as giving a sense of massiveness and lightness . This effect is further based on buoyancy and gravity that form 2 groups known as singular floating masses and multiple floating planes. The difference between these groups is that the former contains more mass. Multiple floating planes consist of 3 types- vertical stacking support, slanting support and curved support.

ii) Grounded Flight

Leandro Locsin transformed the floating quality of the buildings into much lighter forms. They are characterized by not being rectangular blocks and having a connection to the ground, which provides the building support too. The foot base of the building supports it and articulates the separation from the ground. What makes it different from the floating effect is that the grounded ‘flight’ has much evident movement in its form, and it also has a dominant roof form inspired by the traditional architecture.

iii) Enclosed Openness

Leandro Locsin had a poetic harmony between the interior and exterior architectural spaces. He focussed on creating an enclosed openness that segregated spaces and at the same time, maintained a continuous flow throughout the rooms. The bipolar quality emerges as the forms undergo the endless flow of detachment and integration. Such spaces often have multiple enclosures permeable with barriers around a central core like in traditional Filipino architecture. The Church of the Holy Sacrifice, National Arts Center and the Monastery of the Transfiguration are a few examples of such enclosed spaces.

iv) Alternative Spatial Characters |  Leandro Locsin

Leandro Locsin creates the spaces by laying emphasis on the non-physical barriers and dividing them by an alternation of opposite spatial characters like narrow-wide, and light-dark. He designs a low entrance with dim-lit spaces, and he creates contrast by having large, light, and airy inside space to allow synthesis of the spatial characteristics. 

The dominant core with high ceilings and narrow residual multiple rooms of human scale often have no other tangible barriers and yet allow easy integration. Some examples of this bipolar quality are evident in the Ayala Museum, PICC, CCP Theater, the clubhouse of the Canlubang Golf and Country Club, and the Nutrition Center.

Yachika Sharma is an architect who recently graduated from Chandigarh College of Architecture. She has a profound passion for architecture, poetry, art and travelling. She believes that it is crucial to go on to an adventure to fathom a city and unravel the little subtleties of city life.

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Leandro Valencia Locsin

Leandro V. Locsin was a Filipino architect, artist, and interior designer, known for his use of concrete, floating volume and simplistic design in his various projects. He was proclaimed a National Artist of the Philippines for Architecture in 1990 by the late former President Corazon C. Aquino.

Leandro V. Locsin was born August 15, 1928 in Silay City, Negros Occidental, a grandson of the first governor of the province. He later studied at the De La Salle Brothers in 1935 before returning to Negros due to the Second World War. He returned to Manila to study Pre-Law, before shifting to pursue a Bachelor's Degree in Music at the University of Santo Tomas. Although he was a talented pianist, he later changed again to Architecture, just a year before graduating. He was married to Cecilia Yulo, to which he had two children, one of whom is also an architect.

Diliman Catholic Chaplain, Fr. John Delaney commissioned Locsin to design a chapel that is open and can easily accommodate 1,000 people. The Church of the Holy Sacrifice is the first round chapel in the Philippines with the altar in the middle, and the first to have a thin shell concrete dome. The floor of the church was designed by Arturo Luz, the stations of the cross by Vicente Manansala and Ang Kiukok, and the cross by Napoleon Abueva, all of whom are now National Artists. Alfredo L. Juinio served as the building's structural engineer. Today, the church is recognized as a National Historical Landmark and a Cultural Treasure by the National Historical Institute and the National Museum respectively.

In his visit to the United States, he met some of his influences, Paul Rudolph and Eero Saarinen. It was then he realized to use concrete, which was relatively cheap in the Philippines and easy to form, for his buildings. In 1969, he completed what is to be his most recognizable work, the Theater of Performing Arts (Now the Tanghalang Pambansa) of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. In 1974, Locsin designed the Folk Arts Theater, which is one of the largest single span buildings in the Philippines with a span of 60 meters. It was completed in only seventy-seven days, in time for the Miss Universe Pageant. Locsin was also commissioned to build the Philippine International Convention Center, the country's premiere international conference building and the seat of the Vice Presidency.

The current building was dedicated in 2004, and was designed by the L. V. Locsin and Partners, led by Leandro Y. Locsin, Jr. Most of Locsin's work has been inside the country, but in 1970, he designed the Philippine Pavilion of the World Expo in Osaka, Japan. His largest single work is the Istana Nurul Iman, the official residence of the Sultan of Brunei.

All our texts and many of our images appear under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License ( CC BY-SA ). All our content is written and edited by our community.

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MAS Context Fall Talks 2022

The Complex and Multifaceted Work of Leandro Valencia Locsin

September 27, 2022 at 12PM

Online talk by Jean-Claude Girard with a response by Geoff Goldberg.

Contributors

• Jean-Claude Girard
• Response by Geoff Goldberg

The largely unknown oeuvre of the Philippine architect Leandro V. Locsin (1928-1994) embodies the search for identity in the built environment. Having completed his studies, Locsin opened his practice in 1953 in the capital Manila which, after the aerial attacks by the Allied forces for the liberation of the Philippines from Japanese occupation, had been almost completely destroyed. The reconstruction, as well as technical innovations and favorable political and economic conditions, made it possible for him to design a wide range and large number of projects, including hotels, commercial buildings, churches, cultural venues, and public buildings. His work combines inspiration from modernism with local traditions and comprises a total of 245 projects, of which more than half were completed.

During his talk, architect Jean-Claude Girard, author of the book Leandro Valencia Locsin, Filipino Architect (Birkhäuser), discussed the complex and multifaceted work of Leandro Valencia Locsin rooted in the local conditions of the Philippines. Chicago-based architect Geoff Goldberg served as a respondent to the talk.

You can purchase the book from its publisher or your local bookstore:

→ Leandro Valencia Locsin, Filipino Architect (Birkhäuser, 2021).

St. Andrew the Apostle Parish Church, Makati, 1967. © Akio Kawasumi.

Population Center, Makati, 1972. © Akio Kawasumi.

Ayala Museum, Makati, 1974. © Akio Kawasumi.

CCP Folk Arts Theater, Pasay, 1974. © Akio Kawasumi.

CCP Philippine Center for International Trade and Exhibitions, Pasay, 1976. © Akio Kawasumi.

Contributor Bios

Contributor

Jean-Claude Girard is a Geneva-based architect. He is the founder of the architecture office Jean-Claude Girard Architecte and a lecturer at the School of Landscape, Engineering, and Architecture (HEPIA) in Geneva. He studied architecture at EPFL and his final project, which dealt with the theme of interreligious sacred space, won the 1998 SIA Prize (first prize for architecture). From 2013 to 2018 he developed a doctoral thesis on the Filipino architect Leandro V. Locsin at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale (EPF) in Lausanne under the supervision of Professor Bruno Marchand. In 2021, he published a comprehensive monograph on the works of Leandro V. Locsin titled Leandro Valencia Locsin, Filipino Architect (Birkhäuser).

Geoff Goldberg has practiced for more than 30 years in Chicago as an architect and urban designer. Along with his own practice, he has taught architectural design and theory at University of Illinois at Chicago for several years. Current focus is on notions of form, particularly the construction and composition of complex shapes, with investigations into the archives of several artists and architects as part of research on the history of form. Work has been done at a variety of scales, from details to managing large urban infrastructure projects in both the public and private sectors. Awards have been received for design, urban planning, and writings on engineering.

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Leandro V. LOCSIN

Leandro v. locsin／ arts and culture prize 1992.

Arts and Culture Prize 1992 [3rd]

--> Architect Born August 15, 1928 （aged64）

Mr. Leandro V. Locsin is a celebrated architect of the Philippines. He designed numerous modern building, which adopt climatic features of Southeast Asia and the traditional style of the Philippines. His accomplishment contributed remarkable to the development of architectural culture in Asia.

The details of title, age, career and award citation are at the time of announcement of the Prize.

Award Citation

Mr. Leandro V. Locsin is a distinguished architect in the Philippines who has blended modern architecture harmoniously into the climate of Southeast Asia.

The Philippines has high temperature and high humidity; it is located in a volcanic zone and is thus vulnerable to earthquakes. As a result, durability and ventilation are necessities in Filipino architecture. Large roofs, long eaves and high ceilings are typical characteristics of traditional Filipino architecture.

Mr. Locsin's works beautifully incorporate such traditional qualities with the openness and vastness of modern architecture. His unique interpretation of architectural features such as lattice and curved lines are eloquently expressed in his modern, Western form of art. What lies behind this originality is his principle: to synthesize or to blend Western and Eastern culture. Without this theme, the modern architecture of the West could not have taken root within the existing Filipino architecture.

His private life is characterized by continued commitment to other arts and culture. He is a fine pianist, a deeply committed admirer of oriental art and the visual and performing arts. When his multi-faceted artistic talent is fully exhibited in architecture, its details display a well-calculated beauty of form, and its appearance reshapes the urban landscape.

His architecture enjoys broad recognition and he has garnered many honors and awards. The Filipino architects of the early 20th century were trained in Europe and the United States, and since then almost every Filipino architect of note has taken undergraduate or graduate studies abroad. Mr. Locsin, however, has pursued his studies within the Philippines, and has acquired his formal education from the University of Santo Tomas. His phenomenal career is not only evidence of a natural wealth of talent, but also a tribute to his Filipino mentors and to Filipino culture which in its colorful variety has been a cradle of genius.

As such, Mr. Locsin's achievements have contributed immensely to the advancement and recognition of Asian architectural culture. Therefore, he is surely worthy of the Arts and Culture Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prizes.

Biography of Leandro V. LOCSIN (PDF)（PDF, 57.1KB）

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Architecture

Forging modernism: the early years of leandro locsin, the poet of space's lyricism was the fruit of his own exposure to and practice of the other arts, april 6, 2018.

He was the first Filipino architect that truly made an international reputation. At the height of his career in the late ‘70s, National Artist Leandro Locsin (1928-1994) was the most influential architect in Southeast Asia, with his crowning international project in the form of the enormous Istana Nurul Iman, the palace of the Sultan of Brunei finished in 1984—still the largest single residential structure ever built.

To the people of the Philippines, Locsin’s prestige has never been in doubt. His Modernist buildings, which combine a monumental solidity with a graceful lyricism of line and motif, had been celebrated ever since his first major commission was unveiled in 1956.

Early Years

Known as “Lindy” to his friends and admirers, Locsin was that rare combination of Filipino painter, musician, and poet of architectural space. Born of the prominent sugar-growing Locsin clan in Silay City, Negros Occidental, Lindy was the eldest of Guillermo Locsin and Remedios Valencia’s seven children, and was named after his paternal grandfather, Don Leandro Locsin y de la Rama, who was Negros Occidental’s first governor.

Like many boys of prominent Negrense families, he studied with the La Sallian brothers in Manila from 1935 until 1947 (except for that brief but horrifying wartime interlude from 1942-45 during which he fortunately decided to return home to Silay, escaping the massacre of his classmates and teachers during the brutal Battle of Manila).

Already gifted with a precocious artistic talent, Lindy contemplated taking a pre-law course before deciding to enroll as a Piano major instead at the Conservatory of Music of the University of Santo Tomas (UST), while dabbling in painting—thanks to the proximity of the College of Architecture and Fine Arts (both colleges were located inside the UST’s Main Building at the time).

Getting to know Manila’s emergent Modernist art movers in the late ‘40s, Lindy was also a regular habitué at Lyd Arguilla’s Philippine Art Gallery (PAG) in Malate, where he would meet and befriend Fernando Zobel de Ayala, who had just returned home after finishing his MFA at Harvard—and would later be pivotal in hiring Lindy as a student draftsman at Ayala Corporation in 1953 when they were doing the master plan for Makati.

Perhaps it was due to his interest in the arts, while realizing that there was a dearth of good architects in the country during that period of post-war reconstruction, that pushed Lindy to shift from Music before graduating in 1949, and transfer to Architecture, where he would be overseen by mentors like National Artist Victorio Edades, who was himself both architect and painter.

Edades’ advocacy of Modernism was a profound influence on the young Locsin, and would instill in him a strong sense of aesthetic progressivism in which the powerful use of modern materials like concrete and glass, and the deployment of abstract, brutalist forms found in the International Style of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, were complemented with the aestheticized treatment of architectural form and detailing by pioneer Modernists like Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

READ MORE:  The Emerson Coseteng House by National Artist Leandro Locsin

Searching for a synthesis of this in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, Lindy would have looked at the most recent developments of Filipino and Japanese architecture that had been grappling with these issues. Among them would have been the work of National Artist Juan Nakpil, who also taught at the UST before the war, and who was then finishing several buildings for the newly transferred University of the Philippines (UP) campus at Diliman using an Art Deco-meets-International Style design aesthetic. This would be complemented by Cesar Concio’s more “brutalist” interpretation of massive but simplified forms in UP Diliman buildings like Palma Hall.

Another was the post-war work of Japanese architects like Sutemi Horiguchi and Kenzo Tange, who were themselves embroiled in a post-war debate as to how to translate Modernist architectural forms using a Japanese sensibility: whether to continue traditional idiomatic stylizing (called sukiya) in modern structures, or to discard the “vernacular look” completely and go for a more ambiguous “Asian spirit” translation using purely Modernist forms.

These debates would soon resound in construction sites throughout the Philippines in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with Lindy at the forefront of their translation. During his early years as an architect, Lindy also benefitted from a brief visit to the US to meet some of the groundbreaking Modernists that he had come to admire, such as Eero Saarinen and Paul Rudolph.

The UP Chapel

The first opportunity for Lindy to jump into these design and aesthetic debates occurred when Zobel recommended him to the Ossorio family of Victorias, Negros Occidental, to design the family chapel. The project was cancelled when the Ossorio patriarch departed for the US, however, and Lindy was left with an unbuilt design that would be resuscitated after his graduation from the UST in 1954, when Father John Delaney, the controversial parish priest of UP Diliman, requested him to design a Catholic chapel inside the campus.

Adapting the Ossorio chapel design to this new site, Lindy produced a unique circular plan for this chapel, which maximized the number of seated parishioners in the given area. To complement the circular plan, Lindy also decided to cover it with a thin-shell reinforced concrete dome—the first ever designed and built in the Philippines—and in whose eaves he would place a cantilevered concrete awning that was open in all directions, flanked radially by thin-walled columns that supported the dome, giving a salakot hat-like impression from afar that was reinforced by adding a steel tripod tower at the dome’s apex to hold a cross.

This article first appeared in BluPrint Special Issue 3 2012. Edits were made for BluPrint online.

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Dominic Galicia

A noble simplicity.

A Selection of Institutional Projects

• Canadian American School in Bonifacio Global City
• Maria Fe Perez Agudo Center for Leadership Excellence at St. Scholastica's College
• National Museum of Natural History
• Summit School
• Summit School Campus Plan (proposed)
• Supreme Court of the Philippines (competition entry)
• World War 2 Museum on Mt. Samat (proposed)
• Xavier School Nuvali Sports Center

A Selection of Religious Projects

• Chapel in Arzobispado Intramuros
• Chapel of Mt. Peace in Baguio
• Chapel of the Bisita ng Santo Cristo in Pulilan (in progress)
• Chapel of the Magnificat
• Church of "Ang Muling Pagkabuhay Ng Ating Panginoon" Parish in Bagong Silang
• Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Evo City Kawit (in progress)
• Church of St. Benedict in Ayala Westgrove
• Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Antipolo
• Church Plaza and Annex in Makati
• EDSA Shrine Baptistry
• EDSA Shrine Proposed Renovation of the Adoration Chapel and the Installation of the New Marian Altar "Sub Tuum Praesidium"
• Holy Spirit Church and Columbarium in Taytay (in progress)
• Loyola Memorial Chapels and Columbary
• Magallanes Church
• Magallanes Church Adoration Chapel (before fire)
• Magallanes Church Baptistry (before fire)
• Magallanes Church Carillon
• Magallanes Church Refurbishment of Garden of the Way of the Cross
• Magallanes Church Resurrection Station
• Mausoleum in Manila Memorial Park
• Sanctuary of Most Holy Trinity Parish Church in Sampaloc
• Sanctuary of St. Anthony of Padua Parish Church in Singalong
• Santo Niño Church Renovation in Tacloban City
• Santuario de San Antonio Crypt 3 Annex
• Santuario de San Antonio Proposed Renovation of Multi-Purpose Chapels (unbuilt)
• Visita Iglesia 2021

A Selection of Residential Projects

• Apartment in One Serendra Fort Bonifacio
• Apartment in Rockwell Makati
• House in Alabang Hills
• House in Alabang Hills Part 2
• House in Alfonso
• House in Loyola Grand Villas
• House in Loyola Grand Villas (proposed)
• House in Makati
• House in Mandaluyong
• House in Nasugbu
• House in New Manila (in progress)
• House in Nuvali (in progress)
• House in Quezon City
• House in Terrazas de Punta Fuego
• House with Arched Windows
• House with Tall Windows
• Lario House Prototype
• The Mondrian Residences in Filinvest Alabang

A Selection of Commercial & Industrial Projects

• Bank Headquarters in Batangas (proposed)
• Commercial Building in Makati (in progress)
• Corporate Headquarters (in progress)
• Hark Building in Intramuros
• Herald Building in Intramuros
• Hyundai Logistics Center
• Lamp (for Casa Periquet)
• Meridian Icon (competition entry)

A Selection of Hospitality Projects

• Banaue Hotel Renovation (proposed)
• Island Resort near Palawan (proposed)
• Kilyawan Farm Resort in Ibaan
• The Picasso in Salcedo Village Makati

Writing and Advocacy

• A Noble Simplicity: The Last Project of Leandro Locsin
• Dito Ako Lulugar: The Place of the Architect
• Escolta At Heart
• Escolta on the Rise
• ICOMOS Day 2015 Opening Remarks
• No Architect is an Island
• Occupy Escolta
• Patina and Immanence
• Report from Manila
• Sacred Hill: The Church of Nuestra Señora de la Asuncion in Santa Maria Ilocos Sur
• Stories Threatened: the Heritage of Manila as Seen Through Escolta
• The Concurring Light
• The Invisible Becoming Visible and Vice Versa (BluPrint 20th Anniversary)
• The Old Manila Hotel and the Sea
• The Spirit of Architecture (World Architecture Day 2022)
• Traversing Boundaries

The Lucila Project

dance - arts - culture... life from the philippines to canada.

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Saturday 7 April 2012

Leandro locsin: philippine national artist for architecture, no comments:, post a comment.

Greenbelt 1 is not the first Locsin building demolished in Makati and it will not be the last

• Before he was a National Artist for Architecture, Locsin’s prolific body of work began with a few buildings along and around Ayala Avenue—where most of it also met their fall

This week, we said goodbye to the iconic Makati shopping mall Greenbelt 1, which was designed by National Artist for Architecture Leandro Locsin. Originally named Greenbelt Square and built in 1982, the structure will be demolished to give way to renovations.

Under Republic Act No. 10066 or the National Cultural Heritage Act of 2009, any work by a deceased National Artist is considered important cultural property, protecting it against exportation, modification, or demolition—but it can be delisted after the owner files a petition, as Ayala Land did back in July. The land developer filed a petition with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) to remove its Presumption as Important Cultural Property.

Why there are many Locsin structures in Makati

Locsin was conferred the order of National Artist in 1990. “Every Locsin Building is an original, and identifiable as a Locsin with themes of floating volume, the duality of light and heavy, buoyant and massive running in his major works,” the NCCA website reads.

From the start of his career in 1955 to his death in 1994, he produced 75 residences and 88 buildings, including 11 churches and chapels, 23 public buildings, 48 commercial buildings, six major hotels, and an airport terminal building.

Greenbelt 1 is just one of the many Locsin structures situated (or once situated) in Makati. The city—particularly Ayala Avenue and the greater central business district—has perhaps the largest concentration of works by the National Artist. The majority of these are private residences for distinguished families inside gated communities.

The reason behind this may be Locsin’s relationship with Fernando Zobel. In his National Artist program for 1990, it was mentioned that Locsin worked as an artist-draftsman for Ayala Corporation while he was still studying architecture, working five days a week in the morning and attending classes in the afternoon and evening.

Zobel also accompanied him during his visit to Japan in 1956, which exposed the young Locsin to Japanese architecture, “expanding his vision of his craft and exerting a lasting influence on him.” It was there, the program read, where he “was impressed by the modular approach to design, the sense of scale and proportion, and the honest use of materials, which played up their natural color and texture.”

“He reaped a lot of recognition as a young architect in the ‘60s, the decade in which he got important commercial and state commissions,” said Karl Castro, co-administrator of the online architecture archive Brutalist Pilipinas. 

“Around this time, Joseph McMicking (Ayala Corporation CEO from 1931 to 1967) led the master planning of Makati, the formative years of which were the late ‘40s to 1970s; Locsin’s heyday coincided with the gestation period of the Makati CBD.”

Locsin’s trip to Japan inspired his design for the Monterrey Apartments, the first luxury apartment on Ayala Avenue completed in 1957. After that, his projects in the area slowly started rising one by one: the Ayala Building I (Elizalde Building) in 1958, the Ayala Building II (Filipinas Life Assurance Corporation) in 1959, and nine residences by the end of the same year.

Just as Monterrey Apartments set the standards for future buildings to rise along the premier address, it was also the beginning of what would become a continued barrage of Locsin structures’ demolition, when it fell in the ‘90s to give way to newer developments.

Other notable Locsin creations demolished in Makati include the Mandarin Oriental, which fell in 2014, and the InterContinental Manila, which was torn down in 2016 to make way for the new OneAyala development. One church, the Chapel of St. Alphonsus Ligouri in Magallanes Village built in 1970 was destroyed in a fire in 2004 and was later replaced and rebuilt by another architect in 2007.

A history of misappreciation and depreciation

Greenbelt 1 was not the first Locsin in Ayala Center to be renovated out of existence. 

In 2002, the Locsin-designed concrete structure that originally housed the Ayala Museum was demolished to update to more modern architecture of granite, glass, and steel designed by his son Leandro Y. Locsin Jr. This was also the early days of the depreciation of Brutalist edifices, which started to get bad rep for being too cold, unaffecting, boxy, and dated.

The movement was also associated with the plunders of the Marcoses, who favored a “distinctive, but slightly demented, architectural aesthetic to legitimize its regime and perpetuate its power,” said landscape architect, urban designer, and environmental planner Paulo Alcazaren in a review of Gerard Lico’s monumental 2003 book “Edifice Complex: Pure, Myth, and Marcos State Architecture.”

Locsin’s iconic landmarks—the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Philippine International Convention Center —one should note, were erected during the Marcos years. While these did cement his stature as a notable architect, these also put his other works under unfair comparisons, which didn’t help the case for protecting and conserving minor and commercial Brutalist buildings decades after their fall from grace.

“There’s little appreciation for modernist built heritage,” Castro said. “When we think of “heritage structures” we usually think of churches or Spanish colonial buildings. The design of office buildings, malls, hotels, and other more utilitarian/commercial spaces are taken for granted.” 

He added that in the case of Locsin, “predictably, these types of buildings having very different contexts and possibilities, pale in comparison, even called “insignificant” or “nondescript.”

This double standard emboldened owners of these presumed important cultural properties to file for petitions with NCCA to pursue renovations and redevelopment projects. That, coupled with lax laws about heritage buildings (i.e. protection specifically for heritage structures at least 50 years old, or designed by National Artists), spell the demise of these storied buildings. “This is perhaps why many building owners either scramble to demolish modernist structures before they turn 50, or work hard to discredit the value of these structures in order to lift the presumption of ICP status.”

The success of these petitions and the subsequent fall of Locsin buildings in Makati over the years has only resulted in more demolitions as well as petitions, proving just how ineffective the law is in protecting them in the first place. 

The demolition of the BDO Corporate Center, formerly the Philippine Commercial International Bank Towers in 2022, was initially halted by NCCA until it was later found out that it was too late as the property was already halfway torn.

The same year, Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) Inc., the owner of the Ramon Cojuangco Building designed by Locsin in 1982, petitioned NCCA to remove its presumption as an important cultural property. In the petition, PLDT argued that the 15-story building is “generic, nondescript, and purged of any references to local culture, tradition, climate, or identity of the place” and “does not demonstrate exceptional cultural, artistic, and historical significance.” It added that the Cojuangco Building “considerably differs from the distinctive style of Locsin.”

Castro and the dedicated architectural heritage advocates behind Brutalist Pilipinas were instrumental in temporarily halting the demolition that will pave the location for “a modern, ecologically sustainable, and open campus-type headquarters.” The building still stands and is in use but for how long, no one knows.

‘Battle between recognizing cultural patrimony and making profitable business’

It is not just Locsin buildings that are threatened in Makati. Even more vulnerable are other structures of note by underrated Filipino architects, who did not have the privilege of being conferred the order of National Artist like Locsin was.

Castro cites as an example Carlos Arguelles, a leading figure in the International Style of architecture in the 1960s but was not proclaimed a National Artist. “Buildings like the Magallanes Theater in Makati and Philam Life Theater in Manila had much less legal protection. If buildings by a National Artist like Locsin are not spared the wrecking ball, then those by architects who are not National Artists are even more at risk.”

Asked what about these buildings then—regardless if they’re by a National Artist or not, and the depreciation of unconventional heritage structures aside—makes them susceptible to destruction, Castro has this to say: “Many of them, owing to their age, need updates to make them more accessible, more up to codes, which may not have existed at the time of their construction, or are simply seen as an unprofitable use of prime locations.” 

The SSS Makati Building, originally Sarmiento Building, by two(!) National Artists for Architecture Ildefonso Santos and Leandro Locsin built on Ayala Avenue cor. Rufino Street, Makati in 1965 comes to mind. It’s now a derelict building that has been closed off and seems only to be awaiting its eventual fate: to acquiesce to a new building.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by #modernistpilipinas (@modernistpilipinas)

“It is a battle between recognizing cultural patrimony and making profitable business,” Castro concluded. “Somewhere amid this struggle, the task of imaginative and committed adaptive reuse may be left unpursued.”

After the dust of consecutive demolitions settles, it becomes apparent that the rise and fall of these buildings is but a cycle that serves only to make the myth of Makati as a prosperous, ever-adapting city seem somehow a reality for those who live in and profit off it.

Historian Ambeth Ocampo may be onto something when he wrote a story aptly entitled, “Wonderful shell of heritage” about the then-newly-opened Ayala Museum redesigned by Leandro Locsin Jr. in 2004 after his father’s original Brutalist edifice was torn down.

“When the old Ayala Museum was demolished two years ago some rabid heritage conservationists complained that the commercialization of Makati had a numbing effect on people leading to a lack of concern over the squat, dated concrete box designed by the late National Artist for Architecture Leandro V. Locsin. In its place now stands an imposing six-story structure of granite, glass, and steel, designed by Leandro Y. Locsin Jr.—a new Ayala Museum bigger and better than the old one, In time the Ayala Museum will drop the adjective new and the old structure will again be a memory.”

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A Study on Bipolarity in the Architecture of Leandro V. Locsin

2009, Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering

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Form Follows Values / Voices

The big idea: andy locsin of leandro locsin partners.

Presentation by Aldo Mayoralgo, Andy Locsin, and LVLP Edited by Judith A. Torres

Editor’s Note: The second speaker on Day 1 of B+Abble 2021 is Leandro Y. Locsin, Jr. , administrator and design consultant to Leandro V. Locsin Partners.

LVLP is the current incarnation of an unbroken architectural practice founded in 1955 by Leandro V. Locsin (†), Philippine National Artist for Architecture. The firm is credited with having produced many of the country’s most distinguished works of modern architecture. Since 1955, the firm has designed over 33 public buildings, 75 commercial buildings, 6 hotels, 13 churches, several country clubs and museums, and more than 100 residences.

Andy Locsin joined the firm in 1990 and has been responsible for helping the Partners establish its governance policy. He serves as an internal critic and design consultant on the firm’s defining projects and as presenter for the firm’s complex and important work. He is often at the forefront of the firm’s joint design efforts with allied collaborators, design partners, and consultants. He earned a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1989), after completing the double major of Architecture and Eastern Art History from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut (1984).B+abble is a series of talks on architecture in design initiated by Filipino firm, Buensalido+Architects . B+abble 2021 was held via teleconference on October 22 and 23.

Hi, folks. Good afternoon to everyone. This presentation is called The Big Idea . It speaks to the firm’s design approach over time. We are a second-generation firm, so this dovetails very nicely with B+abble’s theme this year, Continuum .  We are the third iteration of a firm that my father started before 1955 as a single architect. Eventually, he organized his firm into Locsin Associates and then, Leandro V. Locsin and Partners. Us being the third iteration, we dropped the “and” because the people in the firm, the principals, are essentially his partners. So, we are Leandro V. Locsin Partners.

We start here. This was always true to form with my dad when he started the practice. He felt that architecture was meaningful and had the potential to be iconic, only if it resonates on many levels, as with great art. It had to have something that captures the spirit, and an idea that continues to be relevant over time to the people who see it and use it. That’s how something remains relevant. Once that’s lost, then the architecture itself is somehow lost to society as well.

As many of you know, he’s best known for buildings like the CCP, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, which has remained in use over time.

And society, our country, chose to recognize him as a National Artist.

So, this is a story of how he developed his practice and the legacy we inherited. The timeline spans from his early years, pre-1950, all the way to 2000.

When we say “the big idea,” it’s evident to many observers familiar with his work that there was something entirely unapologetic to his architecture. The diagrams were extremely clear. The building itself was expressionistic about the way it was built and about the big, original idea.

This is an initial model of what later became the University of the Philippines chapel. You see that big idea of something in the round carried through from the drawing to what became this building.

This is a picture from years ago, before the chapel had been overgrown by trees. The diagram was clear, the parti was clear, and the execution in the end followed through. And that form continued to endure.

Like so many of you young guys, his career began with work that was commissioned. Here he is in talks and interactions with the academe, with symposia such as this. Look at that blackboard in the back. We’re still talking about the same things as they were in the 50s and 60s—the issues of technology, aesthetics, communication, social responsibility and responses, and philosophy.

His architectural dialogue has been consistent over time, and he had a robust, collegial interaction with his contemporaries, with the architects of the day, which we are seeing again in venues like B+abble.

The schemes that came out of that early office, you can see a very, very strong design sense—concepts of floating volumes, openness, a horizontality that was of the earth, and a lifting of those volumes off the ground; reminiscent to some degree of an abstraction of what Filipino architecture could be. In the firm’s residential work and hotel work, like the shot on the bottom right of the Davao Insular Hotel, you see this openness, this questioning of what’s outside and what’s inside—a powerful sense of that approach to modern architecture.

And in his later years at the office—some of you might recognize drafting tables. Yes, they did exist! If you can see my pointer hovering over this person, one of the characters that came through the office is Ana Castillo, who heads the architectural group of Century Properties these days. She was a partner at the firm and then moved off to Century. This fellow over here (in white shirt, left) was my dad’s oldest senior partner, Ruben Protacio, who ran the firm after my dad died. This fellow is an interesting fellow named Alex Zaballero (with glasses next to Protacio), who is now one of the managing partners at a firm called TPG in New York, an award-winning firm.

So many people have come through the office and have done the office proud and themselves proud. The result, of course, is these buildings—very, very strong, informed, recognizable, some might say iconic, and, to some degree, familiar. One possibly unfamiliar building on the upper left is the Palace of the Sultan of Brunei, done in the early 80s. That’s not in the Philippines. And the building directly below it is the Expo 70 pavilion in Osaka, Japan.

And over the years, there have been people who have come around, like Caryn Paredes Santillan , who have begun to take apart the architecture and study the design precepts of my dad’s firm.  Some of you may have seen these drawings—the idea of the floating volume, the references, basically, to the bahay kubo or Asian houses, lifting the volume off the ground. Then these ideas of compression, squeezing compression in elevation and in section were familiar concepts in many of his buildings.

I’ll just fly through these, but they’re essentially diagrams of the concepts, the partis , the big ideas, of these individual buildings. Very, very clear diagrams and something that, actually, we reinforce in the firm’s work today. The floating effect, the grounded plane, the grounded flight, these large concepts that were characteristic of the work of that previous iteration of the firm.

The question is, of course, it’s an issue of taking a jumble of variables, reading a program correctly, looking at the project’s ambitions, distilling it into a big idea—again, the firm’s theme—and then giving meat to that, iterating, and coming up with a form that works on so many levels. And operates in a way that people can read the building in so many different ways, and different layers of meaning.

Some see a sailboat, some see a vinta , some see praying hands, some see a bird about to take flight, some see a conquistador’s helmet. And it’s that complexity that makes for very, very interesting architecture. This building, the Philippine pavilion in the 1970 Expo in Osaka, Japan,  no longer exists. But somehow, people still refer to it as one of the more definitive works of the firm.

This is a picture of him in the early 90s at the office. Some of you will recognize the Tuscany building in the back, on the left. And you see in the long shot, the Intercon. The Shangri-La does not yet exist. 

I offer this diagram to explain how the office thought about the design process during the time of my dad and his colleagues. And it all begins with the first, at the top—thinking deeply about the building program, the conditions, the forces that act on the site, and the project’s aspirations. When I say the project’s aspirations, I don’t mean only the client, but what does the building try to do? What is it trying to say?

Distilling that into a big idea, refining and reinforcing that idea, bringing to bear all the firm’s vast knowledge—in my dad’s case, his and his design partners’ individual backgrounds—on that big idea, looking to restrain oneself and not going overboard. And this is where the idea of timeless architecture comes in: avoid the obvious, avoid over-indulgence. Instead, abstract the meaning of the essence of the form, so that it acquires many, many layers of meaning.

And then, in the end, trust the public or the user to bring their own experience, rather than the architect’s idea being forced on everybody else. So, it’s about trusting the general public to get themselves into the essence of the building.

And that’s, in effect, what makes a building resonate. And then you do it all over again. You do this at almost every stage, from the schematic design development to the details of the building.

So, the question is, in this continuum, what of that stuff has been leftover and passed on? Our argument is that these ideas and that approach to architecture live with the changing times. And I’ll start off with a set of drawings to show that.

Ayala Museum

This is the very first diagram of the Ayala Museum—it looks like chicken scratch. But it’s a plan. If you look at the horizontal line at the bottom, that’s Makati Avenue. And then the curved area to the right is De la Rosa Street. How that diagram came about was essentially a function of the TOR of the museum—the requirements of the museum—and talking about its ambitions and the site conditions that work on it.

And we had this as its basic set of programs. There was one side which we call “the profane,” which was right on the street side, the public face of the museum. Then, the other side of the program, because of that corner condition bordered on the Greenbelt Park where there was this amazing tree, we thought of as the “sacred area.” So, one side was boisterous, an energetic urban exterior; the other was this quiet, contemplative side.

Part of the museum’s program was reaching out to the public. And yet it also had to be a protective repository for the museum’s objects and iconography.

And so, you see here the development of this diagram: You had the sacred side, which is where the tree is, and the profane at the street corner.

In between is a visual connection between the profane and the sacred, the transition from one to the other.

When you look at the forces working on the site, the angle of De La Rosa Street, that curve, we applied that to the façade of the volume of one part of the program, taking that same curve, applying it to the second element, but in elevation, in 3D.

One part of the program, this protective part where the objects would sit, was a solid piece. These dualities of the museum program and ambition. And then the other side, a glass tower that was a more public face, projecting openness, transparency. This is where the classrooms in the museum were. There is always this connection to the tree from the sacred to profane and the mediating structure that ties the two parts of the museum together.

And this was the initial sketch of what that museum might feel like. So, you have the glass tower on the left, the solid piece on the right, this interlocking piece in the middle that became the transition point, joining profane to sacred. And then this interlocking piece in the middle, this bridgeway composed of two parts, one transparent, one solid.

And here’s what got built after several iterations. This is the Ayala Museum most of you know. Now, it was unforeseen that the museum would grow in such a huge way that they had to find a way to reclaim space. In the footprint of the museum, there was no opportunity to build upward.

So this is what you’ll see. Some of you have been out in this pandemic. There’s restorative work, renovation to the museum, and this is what it’s going to end up looking like. We’ve created a new crossing space. That large glass façade that’s very transparent still becomes a mediating space between the tree and the sacred space beyond and the profane.

So again, it all begins with thinking deeply about the building program in this seven-step process. It’s not actually very prescriptive because some of this happens in a very natural, organic way. But if you were to diagram the thought processes—the design process—it looks like that.

CCP Redevelopment

Further to that, bridging generations, here are two projects that had to do with a competition some 10 years ago for the redevelopment and addition to the CCP complex. The program called for a new Artist’s Center and a new, smaller theater while they rehab the old CCP.

How did the bridging happen between these two projects? People have talked about the design of the CCP as this volume floating up off the ground. The architects, Raul and Ed, who had worked on the CCP in the 60s, explained this idea of the Filipino house—an abstracted volume floating off the ground. And this idea of reclaimed land with water and a kind of wave action working on the bottom part.

We think it resonates with some people because it’s a very familiar landscape, like the image on the right of a rock that’s been worn over the years by the water’s action.

Diagrams of the CCP—the flow of the volume, the lifting off of the ground, and that wave action, this resonating thing.

And it means many things to people. People see this as a wave, as worn rock, or just a fantastic cantilever.

Looking at the inside, you get the sense that it was sculpted and worked on and worn away by time. The stair, the lobby, and culminating in this cavern-like theater where you get the feeling that at one point it was solid, but somehow, was worn away and carved away.

And so, this was the project. The CCP is the building in the front in white on the right. And then these two lots to contain the Artists’ Center in the middle, and then a new theater to the left.

We looked at the diagram as a bookending exercise, with the existing CCP building on the left, a lower structure in the middle, and then bookended by another theater on the right, facing the ocean.

Inspirationally, we went back to this idea. The original idea of this worn rock volume lifted off the ground. We introduced the idea of mangroves, you know, you look at the sea conditions and how it’s worn. The issue of climate change, making the building ready and open, a much lighter structure, and then, the idea of islands—these three pieces, notwithstanding that they’re separate buildings, are somehow interconnected by the stitching, the quality of the ocean, or the water.

And this was the presentation for the final scheme. You see the CCP on the left, the rear-facing Roxas Boulevard, the Artists’ Center in the middle, and then the new theater on the right.

We’re hoping that one day this thing gets built. They’ve started on some pieces of these two structures already. That’s the Artists’ Center. You can see the thing sort of lifting off the ground. Climate-ready, if there is a flood or a tidal pull or storm, it would be a safe building. The generally open quality of the spaces lifted off the ground, the connecting pieces, the old CCP, and the new theater.

This is the initial diagram of the theater, this basic idea of this light mass on the top, somehow reflecting the bottom, is also lifted off the ground. This is the original scheme that was picked. It’s actually Sudar Khadka’s diagram. Many of you know Sudar, who did the Philippine pavilion at the latest Biennale in Venice.

And you can see how we worked on it, twisted it around with the technology of computers, remodeled it. And some of those qualities are still captured; you see some of the wave action, the hollowing out of the base, very familiar to those well-acquainted with Philippine shores, and the final design entry to that new theater. Again, the inside hollowed out, some kind of force removed from it, and, finally, the overall face of the building.

So, I’m trying to say that there are shared values and similar thinking about a big idea going through from LVLP’s previous iteration to the next, from one generation to the next.

Guggenheim Helsinki

Here are a few projects of this generation. Some of you might have joined this competition—a thousand seven hundred entries for the Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki! We, of course, did not win. But some exciting things happened. We expected there would be these fabulous schemes done with all the technology available today. Fantastic computer renderings, technology-based schemes, and presentations.

And we wondered… we said, “Okay, we could do that. But, on the other hand, do we become another peanut in a bag of nuts? Or do we do something really kind of weird and go back to roots about ideas? As opposed to sexy images. And that was the attitude we took. The firm operates with a lot of humor. We have a lot of fun in the firm; we joke around a lot; notwithstanding how serious we are about the work. People say that it’s a fun place to work because we try not to take ourselves too seriously.

And so, we turned to the old approach of sketching the idea, the power of a sketch to get an idea across—totally old school. Let’s not be trapped by technology, we said. Let’s think about the idea, which is very much of the old school. And we went back to these tools you guys are all familiar with—models and sketching pens. And we had an esquisse within the firm, there were something like seven or eight entries in a three-day charette. We chose a couple of schemes. The final scheme was a marriage of two schemes.

There’s JP Dela Cruz, these are the two partners, my dad’s partners, Raul Locsin and Ed Ledesma, the managing partner, and the staff talking about what’s going on with that site in Helsinki. The second fellow on the left is Aldo Mayoralgo, who does these presentations with me. We had a lot of animated discussions on how to approach this design problem.

And we ended up with four boards that were completely hand-drawn and pieced together. And these are some of the drawings: a straightforward idea of section and attitude towards the site; a scheme that confuses what’s outside what’s inside, what is landscape, what’s architecture; an almost Corbusian plan—you can see in the upper right hand, a rather complex sequences of spaces; and a section of how how to actually construct this building, climate-ready, live roof on top, a double-loaded section in the middle.

Here are the four boards. You see JP Dela Cruz on the left and Sudar Khadka on the right. This is right before we shipped those boards off to Helsinki. We didn’t win, but we ended up on ArchDaily as one of the 32 discarded—I like the word “discarded!” We were rejected, but they thought that this was a scheme people had to know about. And it all was based on this simplicity, a big idea that was powerful, as opposed to a pretty picture.

Tower Two, Mandarin Hotel, and Park Central Towers

Second project. Something you guys might be familiar with that you’ve seen over a couple of years, these projects going up. This is a bird’s eye rendering of the Ayala Triangle. And the old Mandarin site. The Ayala Triangle is on the right. Two new buildings are going up there. One will be launched this year; we’re finishing it up. And then a set of buildings on the left, on the old site of the Mandarin Hotel. Four very tall buildings on sites facing each other. And these projects morphed into something where we began working with overseas consultants to do projects here at a scale and with ambitions that were really quite high.

We see these collaborations with foreign consultants not as a rubber-stamping issue but as an opportunity to learn technology approaches from people who have done this many times in the past, so we become richer as designers. But, at the same time, we pass on information of what it takes to execute a building in the Philippines to a much higher standard than is usual. So, they learn something from us. And our demand is always to co-design, as opposed to simply carrying out an existing design. So, it’s very, very collaborative.

These are the two projects, the Ayala Triangle on the bottom. The tall building in the middle is called Tower Two. And then the shorter building is the new Mandarin Hotel that will open in a few years. And then, the two buildings to the left are the Park Central Towers. One is a 72-storey building, the other one, a 62-storey tower. So, the scale of these buildings is tremendous. They’re huge.

Tower Two and the Mandarin Hotel on the left, and then the Park Central Towers on the right…

…and how they’re going to end up looking like. Tower Two and Ayala Triangle become an extension of the park at the base. And then there’s greenery built into Park Central Towers on the right.

Doing buildings like this takes incredible collaboration and an open attitude to get the best possible results. On the left, you see the Tower Two Ayala Triangle team. Those are the guys from Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill out of Chicago. They came here, worked here; we went over there, worked there. It’s been back and forth.

On the right side is the team of Soo Chan from SCDA Architects in Singapore. There was a particular apartment type that we were looking at that’s never been done in the Philippines. And so, Ayala tapped Soo Chan and asked to put this project together. These projects take an incredible amount of coordination between extended teams of people. Can’t be done by one.

The results, what Tower Two and Ayala Triangle are looking like today. And then Park Central going up rather quickly.

And so, the question again, of relevance, of meaning. We pose the question: “Is meaning only found in big projects?” And the answer, of course, is it’s not.

McMicking Memorial

We point to this tiny little project where the arrow is pointing down to the right. This tiny thing on Ayala Triangle has to do with memorializing one of the founders of Makati City, part of the Ayala family, Mr. and Mrs. McMicking. Basically, Mr. McMicking was entirely responsible for the approach and planning of Makati. What you see today is a result of those initial ideas.

This is Tower One and the old Philippine Stock Exchange, which we did with Skidmore in the early 90s. This was the site where this memorial would happen. And just as an overall plan of the Triangle as it exists today, you see the preservation basically the central section of the park. Tower One is down to the bottom left. The Plaza next to it is the Stock Exchange over here. Here’s the old Makati Stock Exchange done by my father in the late 60s, the Nielsen Tower or Blackbird, and the two new buildings at the tip.

It’s a relatively large property. But what are we really talking about here? It’s actually this little, tiny piece that is the site. And zooming in, it’s that little object, the tiny little object in the middle of the park. And we put the scheme together that tied together what happens underneath the plaza to the memorial piece.

The big idea was to create a portal. The arch is already a portal, it functions as a portal and what we wanted to do was put a counterpoint down in the park that is a portal in and of itself, looking not only to Makati’s past and how it was established but also into the future, into the environment, and into the green.

Big idea, very simple scheme. It’s like a double portal, basically. You see the overriding proportioning system; basically, the golden ratio creates the portal’s proportion.

What it might look. The intention that people should be able to wade into that little pool of water without any issues, very friendly. And what it ended up looking like, it’s basically a doorway of some sort, an illuminated doorway made of Corten steel, with a water feature.

And at the end of the day, you had very, very happy family, remembering their past in a very modest way, hindi mabonga , it’s not chest-beating. You don’t even have to tell the story of what it is. The object exists in and of itself and can be read on many levels. Same principles, basically. And what we’re saying is a small project can be tremendously rich in meaning and can be just as satisfying and fulfilling as a very large one.

Streetlight Tagpuro

A couple of years ago, we did this little project for Tacloban for a foundation to build an orphanage and study center in Leyte. It’s something we’re incredibly proud of because, weirdly, something completely unexpected, we ended up winning one of the three main awards at the World Architecture Festival in 2017. So, we were the first Filipino firm actually to have won one of the major awards. And this is a project that we remain supremely proud of.

Here’s the location, Leyte, following Typhoon Haiyan or Typhoon Yolanda, and the absolute devastation that happened. The project involved doing a community center for a place that actually had existed before. There was previously a community center there, but just completely wiped out by the storm. Very true to the spirit of what this is all about.

You can see this is the original signup sheet for those who wanted to work on this completely pro bono project. And what you’re looking at there is basically half the firm. Half the firm wanted to be involved in this project. I think it says something about the values of the firm and what it wants to do, what it wants to accomplish, what it cares about.

We went through the seven-step process again—digest the project, what’s the big idea, what are the project’s ambitions? We do this little anthropological exercise in discussion within the firm and then we diagram our thoughts about the project.

And we felt, obviously, at the end of the day, it’s about the community, notwithstanding the values and skills we bring as architects. You have the architects on one side, creating a responsive framework to the community that’s going to use it, creating the meaning, okay, and the community has total input into what that framework can be.

And in keeping with that, we dragged in the community to participate in the design process! Sudar was the lead architect on this project. He ran with the ball together with our staff. They went down to Tacloban with Alex Furunes, a Norwegian architect and close friend of the firm who dragged us into this project. He was the original architect of the first community center that got wiped out. And so, we dragged the community into this. In effect, we transformed that community into architects themselves—not just the heads of the family, but also the women in the family and the children who got involved in the design.

This is one of these things we are supremely proud of. Here’s the framework, the possible design that we were talking to them about. They took this, digested it, changed it around, flipped things around. We asked them what they thought the meaning of a window was, what’s the meaning of a door—these complicated questions that force them to think about things. You see them actually building the initial model down there with popsicle sticks, the tools at hand, right? Doing mockups, the kids got wholly involved in the design of this community center.

You see our architects up there in the upper right, asking them what they thought about one thing or the other. And then the manangs with the big matrix of what’s important to them what they wanted to achieve. And then we’d take that back to the office, and it’s back and forth, back and forth with the team.

We had the Norwegians, the European guys there, I think three or four of them from the foundation, and Alex, living in the office, basically, for two years. We had a little corner in our drafting room to work on this project, building the scheme, building models and mockups of what they thought the community thought windows meant. And looking at the options, making the structure itself. And the final product.

Very simple, buildable, scalable, and the fishing community became a community of competent construction workers. All of a sudden, they had skills of how to put things together. This is opening day. A lot of happy faces, a lot of really satisfied, fulfilled folks. Children. And weirdly, it won (World Architecture Festival’s) Small Project of the Year. At the end of the day, architecture is about people.

2016 Architecture Biennale

One last little project. The 2016 Biennale in Venice. We were chosen to do the first Philippine pavilion. We thought deeply about what we wanted to say. We were concerned at the time with these issues of our history being lost. You see here, the old Mandarin Oriental. And eventually, it was taken down, much to our dismay and chagrin, not a whole lot we could do about it. We had to be big boys when the National Commission on Culture and the Arts said it could be taken down. And the sad moment of the Mandarin being completely flattened.

It’s not the first; it’s happened to work of the firm over the years. The old Benguet building that we thought was one of the best buildings the firm had ever done. And just like that, in the blink of an eye, we woke up one day, and there was a hole in the ground.

We ended up making this proposal called Muhon. What is a muhon ? Muhon as these markers that talk about a place and property and memory and rights. We concluded that these issues of history and identity were issues that were much, much larger than ourselves. It’s not just a Locsin issue. It’s about all of us as architects, builders, people, an entire culture.

A muhon is a primitive act of affirming our existence somehow. And how we understand heritage, rights, etc.

Here we go with those diagrams again. But they’re powerful. We said, this is not about ourselves; this is about everybody else. So, let’s not make it about ourselves. Let’s invite our competitors, our colleagues, people who care about similar things about design. We asked nine architects and artists, and excluded ourselves from that, to create these monuments, these muhon s, to take endangered buildings or spaces and interpret them.

Again, if you remember the diagram, trusting people to bring their own interpretations into what those buildings mean. And these were the nine folks worked with: up there with the Mañosas and Ed Calma, second-generation firms like us that had a heritage.

And then we had mature firms doing really, really good work now, C|S Architecture, Ana Sy and company and Jorge Yulo.

And then the young whippersnapper firms doing fantastic, tremendous solid work—the 8×8 Design Group and Don Lino from Lima. And then three visual artists, Tad Ermitanyo, Poklong Anading, and Mark Salvatus, who had a robust social sense of interpreting our condition.

So those were the nine folks. They chose among themselves from a list of endangered buildings and spaces. We said we’re not going to tell you which to choose. You pick the buildings and interpret these buildings, in their original state, in their current state of modernity, what it is now, and then what they could be in the future. Bring your own self, your own version of what you think this building means to you, and what you see as its significance. Abstract it, reduce it to its essence, create a representation of those things, and do these three muhons.

The venue was these three rooms at the Palazzo Mora in Venice, the first Philippine pavilion. You see the dotted line on the bottom right, Palazzo Mora historical. And we had discussions with advisors Paulo Alcazaren, Patrick Flores, the late Toti Villalon, may he rest in peace, Marian Pastor Roces, Dominic Galicia, and Tobias Guggenheimer—all these guys to advise us whether we were going down a line that made sense. Extremely collaborative. Here you see the nine architects and artists in one of these sessions, a little mockup in the bottom left, of what these muhons might feel like in a space in a room. There’s Ed, with his glasses up on his head, looking at what these things might feel like.

Then in our office, designing the venue, designing the space, it was an all-office effort, a crazy thing to do in the middle of all the work we were doing; we pulled in everybody to give their two cents.

And this is the basic scheme. Big Idea: three rooms, one very dark, one medium-light, then one blank and white, very bright, representing the three states of these buildings and spaces—its history, its modernity, and a conjecture of what it could be.

The layout of the nine muhons . Floor layouts. And these were the schemes that were chosen: the Mandarin, Chinatown, Binondo, PICC, Makati Stock Exchange, Luneta, Coconut Palace, Pasig River, Pandacan Bridge, and Ramon Magsaysay Building. We were flattered that there were three buildings that our firm did that were chosen.

That’s the entrance to the Room of Memory, what it felt like, that dark room of markers. And the grid, basically, the Daniel Burnham grid of Manila.

The second room, the medium room, with the grid denied and a bit of the chaos that we all live amid today.

And then the Room of Conjecture, where it’s blank. If there were no conditions put on the spaces, what could these buildings be?

And the team that put it together, the nine groups, only Ed was missing here; he could not make it to Venice because he’s a busy guy.

There’s a progression and shared DNA from the past in the present firm with those same values intact. The big idea, the process, the thinking behind it, in a very different time.

Going back, there’s my father in the middle with his partners through Ruben Protacio on the left, Orly Mateo and Tito Saguirre, no longer the firm. But the two guys, Raul and Ed, are still with us today.

This is right before the pandemic, talking about a project. The gentleman in the white in the middle is Raul, and Ed Ledesma, our managing partner, who runs the firm today.

So we’re still doing what we’re doing, but in a very different way with a whole set of very different considerations and different situations, more so today with the pandemic, in which so many things are done online. And we have technology to thank for being able to do this. People have adapted very easily because we embraced technology very early on.

Let’s go back. You remember that statement, “A work of architecture becomes iconic only when society finds that it resonates on many levels; when it captures a spirit and an idea that is relevant to and valued by those who view it, inhabit it, and use it over time.

A tweak on that, a refinement—it’s all about meaning. Meaning is found not only in what you do, but in how you do it, who you do it with, and, hopefully, in collaboration with people with synergy and chemistry; and eventually, how that design is shared with the public.

Values that carry over two generations at least. Architecture is, and always will be, about people.

And whether it starts out as this iconic thing, at the end of the day, is there relevance? Yes, there is, if people continue to use it and value it.

Or whether it exists simply in the mind’s eye of a person, somehow there’s value to it.

And when an entire community actually becomes the project. It’s about helping people get through difficult situations. And it’s never been more appropriate as today in this pandemic.

It’s about generosity, about sharing everything you have. There’s no palyahan , no trying to corner every project. There’s enough for everyone. And be generous with your idea, technology, and design thinking. Share it because it raises the bar for everybody else.

It’s about community. It’s about faith, personal faith. Whether you’re agnostic, Catholic, or Muslim, it doesn’t matter. It’s about community. It’s about the society you live in. A little bit corny, but it’s absolutely true. At the end of the day, the big idea is that it’s all about us, and we’re all in this together.

So be generous, share, be a community, help each other. It continues to this day.

And as the last slide, sort of weird proof of all of this. This is the firm as it exists today in the pandemic and just before the pandemic, succession. It’s a continuum. And that little image on the left, believe it or not, is a book coming out that we didn’t do.

Some Swiss architect in the mid-teens visited Manila, became incredibly fascinated with the firm’s work, my dad’s work, went back to Switzerland, and did a PhD. And it became an oeuvre complet . He did a thesis; it’s been turned into a book of the complete works of my dad . I think it’s going to be launched in November this year in Switzerland. We had almost nothing to do with the book, of which we are incredibly thankful. So many of us are so allergic to PR. We’re all about the substance of the work and doing it without fanfare, just doing it as well as we can. We’re not great marketers–it’s the last thing on the list. And we’re grateful simply that somehow the old work continues to have meaning even for people who view it for the first time. Somehow, it retains its power and its relevance to somebody from the outside. So, look out for this. It should be on the shelves maybe at the end of the year and certainly at the beginning of next year. So, with that, thanks very much. Take it away, folks.  •

• November 6, 2021
• #Andy Locsin , #Architecture , #Babble , #Design , #Leandro Locsin , #Philosophy

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