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170604-Philippine Architecture
170604-Philippine Architecture
170604-Philippine Architecture
Leandro Locsin
Leandro Locsin (1928-1994) was in some ways a quintessential Renaissance man. A brilliant
architect, interior designer, artist, and classically trained pianist, Locsin was also a keen art
collector, amassing a sizable collection of fine Chinese art and ceramics during his lifetime. It
is for his buildings, however, that he is remembered. From airport terminals to memorial
chapels, arts centers to stock exchange structures, Locsin left his mark on the urban
landscape of the Philippines.
Locsin was determined to reconfigure western architectural mores for a Filipino audience.
His most substantial contribution to Filipino architecture is the Cultural Center of the
Philippines, a collection of five buildings that demonstrate the architect‟s drive to find a
vernacular form of modernist architecture. The National Theatre building within the complex
is a good example of Locsin‟s trademark style. Known as “floating volume,” it consists of a
two-floor-high block of travertine marble cantilevered 12 feet into the air. The theatre harks
back to traditional Filipino dwelling huts, but on a monumentally modern scale.
Despite the wide range of buildings Locsin created, all of them have one thing in common:
concrete. His ability to make this most monolithic of materials appear weightless, and to
elegantly combine Western brutalism with vernacular elements, led Locsin‟s peers to dub
him the “poet of space.”
An urbane young man who enjoyed lawn tennis and playing the saxophone, Carlos Santos-Viola
was also a gifted architect. He was a devout Catholic throughout his life, and many of his best
known designs were executed for the Iglesia Ni Cristo, a Filipino religious group. Santos-Viola
created churches for the group all over the archipelago, designed in a style quite distinct from
that of his contemporaries. Instead of the monumentalism of Leandro Locsin or the art deco
simplicity of Pablo Antonio, Santos-Viola chose to incorporate Gothic and Baroque elements
into his modern churches.
The Central Temple he built for the Iglesia Ni Cristo shows these revivalist flourishes working in
harmony with Santos-Viola’s passion for geometric shapes and, perhaps more than anything
else, functionality. The desire for functionality informed almost all of Santos-Viola’s work, and
he was fond of asserting that “the structure must not only look good but must also be made
well.”
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