Who is Alfredo J. Luz?

I wrote the other week about the SSS building, Juan Nakpil’s architectural masterpiece in the idiom of the International Style. The building, the tallest in Quezon City until the 1990s, was part of a modernist architecture movement in the country that adapted a worldwide trend that espoused honest and clean lines, function as well as beauty, and a global outlook.

Although the style and movement originated in Europe and the US, other countries like Brazil with Oscar Niemeyer, India with D V Joshi and Charles Mark Correa, and Australia with Harry Seidler adapted the movement to fit their cultures and climates.

Here in the Philippines, the movement had its champions in senior architects like Juan Nakpil, who made the transition from Art Deco, and younger architects like Carlos Arguelles and Alfredo J. Luz.

I have featured Arguelles’ work and career in past columns. Alongside Arguelles’ Manila Hilton and stately Philamlife Building on United Nations Avenue sits another icon of ’60s International Style architecture — the World Health Organization building.

I have always loved looking at this well-proportioned building complex, back in the days when United Nations Avenue was less blighted. The complex’s clean, green lawn and tropical minimalist landscape design was a stylish setting for the horizontal lines of the main building offset by a squat mass with the prominent WHO logo.

The gifted architect of the complex was Alfredo J. Luz, brother of National Artist for Sculpture Arturo J. Luz. AJ Luz was at the cutting edge of Philippine modernism in the late ’50s and early ’60s. His body of work includes the Menzi Building on Ayala Avenue, the Amon Trading building on Buendia, the L & S Building on Roxas Blvd., Dewey Blvd., Manila, and the Fil-Oil Refinery Service Building in Limay, Bataan.

AJ Luz’s architecture embraced the form and line of modernism but adapted it to the tropical climate of the Philippines. He used a lot of passive sun shading made from aluminum in his projects. He often, when he could, put pools and strategic clumps of foliage to further mitigate the hot sun. All these would score him high points today if the building was evaluated with LEEDs (a modern system of rating ‘green’ buildings).

For the WHO complex, Luz composed an asymmetrical but elegantly balanced massing of the main linear offices, a main lawn and an elliptical conference hall. The offices were single-loaded in four floors, giving the option for cross ventilation although the building was air-conditioned.

The elliptical auditorium was designed with a thin-shell roof, a permutation of the innovative structural system first applied by National Artist for Architecture Lindy Locsin in his seminal “flying saucer” chapel at the University of the Philippines. (The WHO complex actually sits on what was the military drill field of the old UP Padre Faura campus). The facility was a hit with international conferences in those days and the interiors by Phyllis Harvey (a pioneer in interior design here) used local furniture, art and accessories.

The WHO complex drew raves from the local press and got the attention of other institutional clients like the Rockefeller Foundation. The foundation was looking for a Filipino architect for its planned International Rice Research Institute and Research Center in Los Baños, Laguna. Luz eventually got the commission for the facility (with Carlos Arguelles designing the housing component). This eventually also led to his design of the Ramon Magsaysay building, which has been singled out by many architectural scholars as the singular gem of the modernist architectural movement in the Philippines.

We still hear from the WHO, what with modern threats like influenza A H1N1. The complex is now the Western Pacific regional office of the institution and it represents the WHO in the Asia Pacific. This important international body addresses global health issues and helps, in no small way, regions and countries like ours cope with modern challenges in health.

The WHO is involved in advocacy, research, databanking, evaluation and resource mobilization. Its avowed mission “…is to lead the regional response to public health issues on all fronts — medical, technical, socio-economic, cultural, legal and political — towards the achievement of WHO’s global health mission,” which is to “…support all countries and peoples in their quest to achieve the highest attainable level of health.”

Well, that’s what we all want — healthy citizens with healthy architecture in healthy cities. And what happened to AJ Luz? Apparently, he migrated overseas in the ’70s, among the many who were forced to do so probably because of the regime change. I still have to dig deeper into his untold story. I should interview his sculptor brother or his son Guillermo of the Makati Business Club and Namfrel.

After Luz left, he turned over his practice to his lieutenants, who formed a partnership — Arcenas, Payumo, Dee and Andrews Architects. Ruben Payumo is still active in architecture, being the designer of the soon-to-be-completed St. Luke’s Hospital in Bonifacio Global City. Luz, as well as APDA, are among the many firms and architects whose work has seen little documentation and appreciation by today’s architecture and design students.

What Luz and architects of his generation have proven, too, is that we do not need foreign architects and design consultants to build our buildings and institutions. Filipino architects have a healthy creative talent that is our medicine against the banality of foreign designs, the virus of globalization without progress and the disease of our colonial mentality that espouses “foreign is better.” Well, it’s not … it’s just foreign.

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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at Paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com. For those interested in culture and urbanity please visit the just opened exhibit curated by the Pasig Art Club for the 2009 Araw ng Pasig at the Pasig City Museum. The club, of which I am proud to be an honorary member, has also scheduled a Heritage Walking Tour of Pasig Poblacion which will start at the Pasig City Museum. For details, call 641-0211.