In a number of meetings and conferences I have been invited to or have  signed up here in Vancouver, I am always engaged in a dance of memories that I had not thought I lug around. The most potent of these is culture. Some time ago, at a conference on Environmental Justice at the SFU Harbour Centre, each of us, participants, were made to draw our thoughts on the environment using Pentel pens on a piece of white bond paper. Mine was a textured web of the Philippines layered by centuries of colonization. My words in the presentation burst out like a dirge for beauty I had not expected; it could have risen partly from nostalgia or so I had thought. After the session, Gil, the Mexican panelist latched on to me. He called me, “prima”; I called him, “primo”. There is nothing new to this. Each time I meet Latinos, they catch me by my name, hugging me con abrazos fuertes. We do share a culture that has been so embedded in our consciousness, but of which we have grown unaware of its implications. On my part, it has been a hundred and eleven years since we’ve been snipped off the colonial cord, almost the same time as most Latin American countries did. Yet, as in those events, what seems to bind us even now is a deep-rooted pain. Yet during such moments of sharing, I always come flying home to Manila, remembering not quite the hurts but with softened edges a tender patch . Like the first time I visited the new building of Instituto Cervantes a week after it was inaugurated. Here is what I recall.

Facade

I had since stepped off the cab, ignoring the driver’s probing why I was going to a “casino” on T.M. Kalaw at midday, and why the new building I said I was really going to—Instituto Cervantes (Manila) he repeated, tongue-twisting—did not have the arko and barandilla he usually sees in Spanish-sounding places. As he sped away, I began looking for the same details he did. 

I realized I had gotten off before the entrance, midway through the horizontal span that begins where Casino Espanol’s stucco wall ends. As I singled along a beige stone-clad wall, I also walked under the slightly jutting walls of an upper story, a dark protrusion covered with oxidized metal sheets that holds up a sheer half of white steel-framed glass picture windows. An image flashed: possibly remote, I had shrugged off; but I remembered as a girl during one of those visits to the seminary in old Vigan far north, ruined since, peeking on tiptoes from one of those huge windows flung wide on feast days, when I tugged along my grandmother to visit an uncle, to watch right under my feet people in a holy procession. I later learned from the architect that the memory had not crept in by accident. 

At the end of the span, I drew a few paces back awed by the contrasting lines and surfaces of the facade. Seemingly not both but only the lower portion of the horizontal span flows into the rise of a medium-high tower I faced; both are clad with those beige stones. Together, they form a right triangle. But in my mind, I transformed the geometric lines into an enormous human form seated on the ground, balancing on its stretched legs a transparent box pulsing with light. The architect would probably think this incredulous but I knew from talking with other architects that a building must take on life and if it does it would take on many guises also. Under the broad tower, I slipped into the entrance—automatic glass doors embossed with the institute’s (ICM) logo—and found myself really wondering if indeed I were inside a Spanish structure.

Shedding off Colonial Stereotypes

Almost embarrassed, I shed off the baggage I had carried—stereotype images of stone churches and houses that are not even Spanish but Filipino colonial buildings. A stranger to the Spain of today, I did recall that high noon reading in the New York Times an article about an exhibit on Spanish architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. Featured with the story were photos of the new terminal at Madrid’s Barajas International Airport and the Museo Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon. The article dubbed Spain as “showcase of some of the most exciting architecture in the world today” and “a center for architectural marvels.” The Instituto’s architect, (and former director) Javier Galvan Guijo, a graduate of Escuela Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid where he also earned his masters and doctorate degrees, must have trained with Spain’s new breed of architects.  

Gaping at the structure I had stepped into, I realized it was time for me to snip anything Spanish off relics of the Philippines’ colonial past or those churches and fortifications friars and military engineers built as well as the bahay na bato (stone house) they improvised to withstand earthquakes and keep off the endless summer heat. Even while Galvan claims his design synthesizes such structures that he has studied and documented in his travels to almost all islands of the archipelago – he goes way back to 1993 lending a hand in Vigan’s restoration – his European modernist sensibilities obviously overcame his love for everything Filipino in this building.

Easier to agree with is his declaration that light is the “protagonist” in his design. He could not have escaped its omnipresence in my country. Light floods any nook, seeps into any cranny, it even creeps into nights in the archipelago—a priceless element that to his dismay local designers tend to ward or totally close off. A Madrileno and thus no stranger to the sun, Galvan set his building up as a stage for a play on light.

Light as Protagonist: Capiz in Modern Design Sensibility 

Patio

  In the lobby, I felt like a dwarf in an enormous cube that opens to the sky. I scaled soaring dark Indian sandstone walls, breathless at the height, the same feeling when I walk into a cathedral or a gothic church—my experience with structures of this proportion being limited to the ecclesiastical. I pushed the comparison further: square incisions in a grid midway up the wall, the architect’s version of capiz (mother-of-pearl shell) windows—a theme he uses throughout—also reminded me not of the checkered pattern but of how light breaks on a wall of the Santuario de Nuestra Senora del Camino in Leon I got fascinated with on a postcard. Too, a soft aura like a haze that followed a few students milling in the lobby had added to the other-worldliness light refracted from the top has lent. But light playing magic on my senses soon dissipated this haloed perception. 

       Right in the lobby, light in its many guises inundates the visitor: fluid as it pours on the walls, solid as in spears piercing the three-sided slits that edge the dropped ceiling, vaporous in slants from the square windows, and mist-like as all that light settles on the blue-gray slate floor. Quality and hue also shift according to time of day, changing as light turns with the sun’s inexorable motion. I had imagined as it rose and hit the facade sideways it daubed the lobby a purplish pink, a hue that faded into yellowish white as noon approached and on to a powdery white as the sun paused in its zenith. When light slanted from the west, the light wavered to a soft aluminum gray as it did right then. But wait! It had brightened up as if from a sudden lift. I turned and indeed, met a splash coming in from the patio, hitting a glass wall tangentially across the entrance; the sun had slid ever so imperceptibly in its downward arc.

         Two things had happened in the splash of light: it poured on to the transition area right above where I stood then spilled down the slate-clad stairs on the wall opposite the entrance to my right, and flooded a rectangular space to my left where the lobby expands. This space boxed in by end-walls painted white is a changing exhibit area. But that afternoon in my light-altered state, it had looked more like a waterway drenched with light whooshing in from clerestory windows atop the length of one wall, and bouncing on the outer walls of the theater, the Salon de Actos.

Easily a seeming favorite among students, I found a group squatted in a circle near the far end of the box washed in the light, their heads huddled like some yet unnamed species of birds in complicity. When another group swung in from the patio through the glass door, meeting the first, both soon lifted off on flapping arms, dripping sparks of fluid light, winging out to the arcade outside. I was left trying to decide whether to climb the stairs or follow the flight of students. I took the second choice.

I followed in their trail, squinting at the stark brilliance of a bare sun. Where I had paused outside the door, I viewed the enclosed Casino Espanol property through the patio and the swimming pool, given elements Galvan worked in to his design. Two contrasting sides of Spain look on each other from here: one, a nostalgic colonial past in the arched terraces and inner garden of the brick-roofed Casino restaurant, and the other, a bold straightforward present in the looming white concrete and glass walls, exposed posts and beams of ICM—two sides the patio sets apart yet blends. 

I walked on to the arcade that the beams and posts create, keeping close to a series of glass doors embossed with the same square grid pattern—those of the suite of classrooms called aula (cage)—tucked under it. I had peeked into each of these entranced by the light like two streams pooling on the floor. One stream comes from the patio, or light that breaks on the marble tiles then spills in, the other like a fluid curtain comes through glass blocks on the back wall.

Spanish Today among Filipinos

Through one of the doors, I glimpsed the students in the changing exhibit area. So they flew back in to their cages, I had t

Interior

hought. Here, along with the 3,600 other students, they have come to learn Spanish, the language half of the world speaks, a language Filipinos once knew. It takes 30 hours to step up to each of the 25 levels or three years of mastery a certificate testifies.

Two weeks after this visit during a yearly event of non-stop reading a work written in Spanish, I would sit in the Salon de Actos listening to some of the students read two pages each of Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, his novel that ignited a revolution, and led to his martyrdom that made him a national hero. Galvan’s dramatic design that alternates dark concrete and light veneer oak on the wall and ceiling, echoed as well on the capiz pattern on backs of seats could have intensified emotions which the text of the novel carried. But the 250 readers, among them mostly students, would focus on the words falling from their tongues, flipping like the foreign objects they still are—though a few would be Spaniards living in Manila and a handful of Filipinos who have lived for years in Spain—thus, pushing emotions in Rizal’s novel a hundred years back where they belong.

Who takes up Spanish these days, anyway? I wondered. Jose Maria Fons, then (and now) ICM’s information officer counted among them young scholars simply interested in the language and Spanish culture, would-be teachers—and job seekers who get an edge with Spanish. I had glimpsed some schoolboys among those enrolled in the children’s program, as Fons would later explain, in the last aula as I climbed the stairs at the end of the arcade.

A spindly crown of pili tree shades the terrace above the arcade. Pairs and trios of students had each taken a spot here, leaning toward the patio, reflecting on the day against the static gleam of the swimming pool, chatting in Spanish; no one here is allowed to speak in another tongue. A row of smaller classrooms that includes a media room — also front and backlit — ends at the library backdoor. A sign forbade me to enter; I was not authorized. But I had pushed because no one was looking and found myself engulfed in a giant triangular box brimming with light.  

The splashes and spears of light at the ground floor and the streams in the classrooms interplay in the library perhaps ten times magnified. Light here roars in cascades from a skylight—a broad band of framed glass multi-axle steel beams support—then it drops to a light well, skimming a white firewall and streaming halfway down to a wall of glass blocks, the same translucent back walls of the classrooms. Its unhampered flow ends on a recessed white-pebbled ground. More light slide obliquely where the ceiling slopes down in veneer oak, slipping through framed vertical glass windows that look out to the patio. I stood by the side of one of the reading desks still facing upward—as if it were the first time I saw clouds scudding by, leaving a stretch of blue. (One rainy day a week later, I would come back here to watch rain wash the skylight gray, then leave patterns of leaves and seashells, and some tiny animal footprints.)  

I wove in and out of the shelves, basking in the luminescence, starting to feel my dormant Spanish waking up—I did understand the titles on the spines of books, even an issue of Geografica on Cristobal Colon. When I got to the last page of the journal, I sensed a coral hue brushing my arm; the sun had begun its descent. I slung my bag on my shoulders and pushed the door toward the transition area. This open space that overlooks the changing exhibit area and the lobby also leads to the offices. Movement is transparent through the glass doors and walls, light-soaked as in every space in the building. The bustle in the offices had reminded me why I was there.

Manila: Gateway to a Double Triangle-Spain to Asia and Spain to Latin America 

Senor Galvan had noticed me. He had just flown in from a two-day visit to Hanoi where Instituto Cervantes through Manila runs small suites of aula; it also does in Singapore and Malaysia. I learned from him that Manila serves as regional center for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. “Nothing new in this role,” said Galvan. Four hundred years ago, Manila opened Asia to the West and the West to Asia; today Manila plays the same role in a double triangle between Spain and Asia in one, and Spain and Latin America in the other.

He then led me to the top of the stairs; light had turned a hazy ash though streaked with coral. Where we leaned against the railing overlooking the lobby, I felt like standing on the ledge of some ancient cave. Senor Galvan laughed off my impression. “That only means this building is alive,” he had said. I had added, “And not blood but light is its force.”

He has since been assigned to IC in Oran, Algeria. This building he designed has been listed among the Top 100 Buildings designed by a Madrilenian architect.

Published in Philippine News Today, Vancouver, BC

posted in iluko.com (shorter version) and in full at filipineses