Stories tagged
‘architecture’

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The house on M. Viola Street

YOU can’t miss the Navals’ house on M. Viola Street in Area 3, a residential community at the back of the University Shopping Center for academic and non-teaching personnel of the University of the Philippines Diliman campus. It is the only two-and-a-half-storey house with 30-degree sloped roofs amid rows of abodes mostly suffocating from the university’s mandated roof inclination of 15 degrees. In lieu of an attic, a commonly inappropriate design feature in modern Filipino homes, is a two-meter wooden balcony that splits the main roof.

Building the breathing spaces

IN THE cookie-cutter residential community for academic and non-teaching personnel of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, the home of the Navals on M. Viola Street is a standout. Amid rows of abodes with roofs inclined at a university-mandated 15 degrees, the cream-and-terra cotta Naval house has 30-degree sloped roofs and a two-meter wooden balcony that splits the upper portion of the structure.

The City

Blueprint for a city’s soul

AT TIMES, when the breeze is just so, the sun is shining, and peals of children’s laughter ring out, Luneta’s grand past can still be glimpsed, leaving no one to doubt that for 19th-century Manila, it was the prime leisure amenity. The American planner Daniel Burnham laid out a grand civic district in Manila, like Washington D.C.’s. Burnham’s grand plan was never fully implemented. Only a few of the planned civic structures were built. After the war, plans were revised to move the capital to Quezon City. Luneta became a cogon-filled no-man’s land eventually turning into the city’s Central Park.