Contemporaries, friends, and brothers-at-arms—these two National Artists reshaped Filipino identity in the '50s and '60s through architecture and landscaping, giving birth to the iconic "Bagong Lipunan" aesthetic
In celebration of National Heritage Month, Metropolitan Museum of Manila launches Leandro V. Locsin and Ildefonso P. Santos, Jnr: A Legacy of Filipino Popular Modernism an exhibition which features the collaboration of two National Artists, Leandro V. Locsin and Ildefonso P. Santos, in their respective and joint visions to create a national identity through the modernist spaces they crafted from the 1960s-1980s. These spaces and built environment, expressed in both landscape and architecture defined their individual identities and shared goals for the different projects they completed. The modernist aesthetics and approach of Locsin and Santos translated into a number of significant architectural and design landmarks represented in this exhibition, which runs until July 30 and in cooperation with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).
Lindy Locsin, as he was affectionately called, was an architect, interior designer, and artist. He was described by his peers and contemporaries as "Poet of Space" for the way he maximised space using straightforward geometry. He came from Silay, Negros Occidental, and spent his formative years with his grandparents. Because his grandfather Don Leandro influenced him through music and learnt the piano, he eventually moved to Manila to study at the Conservatory of Music in the University of Santo Tomas. However, with only a year left to finish the course, he shifted to architecture.
NCCA affirmed, "Locsin reshaped the urban landscape with a distinctive architecture reflective of Philippine art and culture. He believed that true Philippine architecture is 'the product of two great streams of culture, the oriental and the occidental... to produce a new object of profound harmony.'"
Evident in Locsin's roster of works—75 residences, 88 buildings, 11 churches and chapels, 23 public buildings, 48 commercial buildings, six major hotels, and an airport terminal building—are themes of floating volume, the duality of light and heavy, buoyant and massive.