4 UP FORUM Volume 13 No. 6 November-December 2012
Green and Marooned The built and natural legacies of UP Diliman By Paulo Alcazaren
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Landmark buildings In the early 1950s, Concio stayed true to the original symmetrical master plan prepared by Frost, Arellano and Croft. He and Juan Nakpil designed the major components of the central core of the university. Concio designed the Palma and Melchor Halls, while Nakpil designed Quezon Hall, the administration building and the University Library. The rest of the 1950s saw a number of other landmark buildings rise on campus. The two ecclesiastical buildings in the residential district were built within months of each other. Concio designed the Chapel of the Risen Lord with a modernist hyperbolic paraboloid roof while the saucer-shaped catholic Chapel of the Holy Sacrifice was the first major work of Leandro V. Locsin. The catholic chapel (now a church) also housed artwork of what were to eventually be three National Artists—Arturo Luz for the floor art, Napoleon Abueva for the crucifix and Vicente Manansala for the stations of the cross.
Photo courtesy of P. Alcazaren
he University of the Philppines campus in Diliman is an oasis of green surrounded by encroaching urban sprawl. The 493-hectare campus serves as a repository of built and natural heritage that connects us to our past and, as importantly, also holds essential elements for our cultural and physical survival in the context of the metropolis. The university was founded in 1908, a consolidation of schools and colleges previously spread over a number of Manila’s historic districts. The site chosen was municipal land, adjacent to a hospital already rendering service to America’s new colony, and previously used as the site of the 1895 Manila Regional Fair (an exposition in the manner of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago but much smaller in scale). Authorities debated on the site. Options to locate it in more rural settings like Los Baños was considered but the decision to build it close to the city prevailed. A separate agricultural satellite campus was set up a few years later. The university grew in leaps and bounds into the 1920s. The Padre Faura campus was eventually filled with buildings, sports fields and military parade grounds all the way up to Isaac Peral Street (today’s United Nations Avenue). By 1925, university authorities were worried about this expansion and the need to look for a larger campus. Many officials were also concerned about the proliferation of ‘distractions’ like cinemas, “beer gardens” and billiard palaces nearby. Several offers were received including a site near Wack Wack, a popular golf course in the Mandaluyong estate. The plans were shelved and the site offered eventually became the Greenhills district with the La Salle, Xavier and Immaculate Conception schools contained in them.
A park setting Plans for the new campus were firmed up in the late 1930s. The new Philippine Commonwealth president Manuel Quezon took a personal interest in the fate of the university. By 1939 the idea of moving the university was coupled with plans to move the entire capital to a wholly new city, one that would be the center of the eventual independent new republic promised by Aerial photo of UP Diliman, with Gonzalez Hall or the Main Library on the left, and Quezon Hall and the University Avenue the United States. on the right. In the same year Quezon summoned the origiNakpil was to have designed the university theatre and carillon but funds fell short nal consulting architect of the Philippines William E. Parsons to advise on the sites and a large hangar-like surplus structure was used instead. Nakpil poured his creative for both. Parsons had designed the Manila Hotel, the PGH, university buildings, energy into the design of the carillon instead. the Paco train stations and a slew of institutional buildings before returning to the The late 50s and early 60s saw the introduction of elements to, and improvement of, mainland. the landscape design of the campus. First, a major portal was designed by Napoleon A suitable option was found in the Tuason estate east of Manila and Parsons Abueva. Abueva would later add several sculptures all around the campus including a confirmed the viability of the site for the new campus and the new capital. Unfortusculptural playground right next to the UP President’s compound. nately Parsons passed away in December. Next came landscape architectural improvements in the mid-1960s with designs by After Parsons’ passing, President Quezon put together a team consisting of IP Santos, himself eventually honored as a National Artist for architecture like Leandro Filipino architect Juan Arellano, American planner Harry Frost, Parson’s former Locsin. IP created modernist courtyard gardens and portions of a second portal nearer partner in the US, landscape architect Louis Croft and engineer AD Williams to Commonweath Avenue. Santos would also teach at the university, creating the first thresh out the plans for the new capital. They completed the task in early 1941 and formal course in landscape architecture in the country at the College of Architecture. the Philippine legislature quickly approved it and released funds for its implemenOf course by that time too, the original landscape intent for the campus by Louis Croft tation. was starting to mature. The 1941 Frost Arellano plan for Quezon City was a grand plan that had major The acacia trees planted in the 50s were now fully grown creating the famous univercomponents in a 25-hectare elliptical site for the Philippine Legislature, a 400sity loop canopy of green. Santos sought to enhance this rythym with similar designs hectare quadrangle flanked by a new Malacañang and a Courts complex, and a for the main university avenue. Other areas of the university were maturing in greenery 900-hectare University of the Philippines set in a park setting which included what including the arboretum, which has today the problem of being physically separated from is now the Balara Filters complex and chunks of land northeast of the ellipse. the main campus by informal settlers and the joint venture project of the UP Technohub. Frost worked with Arellano for the architecture of the university. Croft was a Through the 60s the campus became even greener with the building of a nine-hole land planner and landscape architect sensitive to natural processes and the lay of golf course, which was one element shown in the original 1941 plan. The course was the land. The final university master plan, as well as the capital city plan, shows his ‘green’ even by today’s standards as it used carabao grass for its fairways and endemic sensitivity expressed in large allocations for open and green space, many parks and vegetation was used to fill in the roughs. playgrounds and wide easement along all natural waterways. The 60s and 70s saw additions to the original compositions of university architecture The basic road layouts from old Manila to the new city were traced by the end by Nakpil and Concio at the central core. of 1941. The first two buildings at the university were completed too, just as war Victor Tiotuyco put together the International Center with its folded plate central broke out in the Pacific. pavilion, while Carlos Arguelles went modernist with a flattened slab for the Faculty The university had to wait until liberation for work to continue. Even then, it Center. Other additions to the campus were Vinzons Hall, the Masscom and Music was commandeered by the US Armed Forces and only turned over in 1949. The buildings, and the Business Ad complexes. All of these were in the International style transfer was marked by the relocation of Guillermo Tolentino’s Oblation to the new with clean lines and brise soliel but no building had as much architectural scale and campus. gravitas as earlier designs in the 50s. The 1941 master plan for the university was turned over to a campus architect, By the 80s and 90s, additions to the campus were smaller and less impactful, Cesar Concio. Concio had completed his masters in the US just before the war with a thesis on an assymetrical plan for the new campus of the UP. continued on page 17