Thoughts

On Practice in the Philippines

Posted by Carlos Arnaiz on May 8, 2026

We have worked for the last 5 years on projects in the Philippines—an archipelago located 5,000 miles away. On a map, the Philippines floats, just above the equator, more like a constellation than a country between China to the north, Vietnam and Indonesia to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east.

The history of the Philippines has been marked by this floating geography. Chinese traders, Hindu merchants, Muslim chieftains, European missionaries all crossed its waters. The country is a collection of things that have never truly been unified: islands, tribes, dialects, ethnicities. The Filipino sensibility has evolved to work within this idea of a loose amalgam.  Hybrid identities are a norm in this place. To design here requires a different understanding of order. We have come to think of scatter and spread as its own kind of organization. People and spaces in the Philippines are almost constantly   drifting apart. Our drawings seek out connections, mining the points of instability in with so much room between identities. 

We are in Brooklyn yet our plane of projection is a distant archipelago with fifty seven dialects and an urban population of over sixty five million people. We have designed homes, pavilions, hotels, office buildings, four churches and an airport there. Our methodologies have become married to the local knowledge we have found. We have started to replace of solidity and legibility in architecture with branching, drifts and other technologies of itineracy.  

The story of the Filipino has become our research agenda. We have studied its history, economy and explosive diaspora obsessively. Diagrams of migration, mixed breeds and successive political revolutions fill our studio. Our work develops geometry as a means to think of loose structures of association. Our ambition is to share our excitement for this culture through our  formal experiments. We are convinced that architecture must work through the physics of our social realities.  

We are outsiders to this place. I was born in the Philippines, moved to the U.S. twenty years ago and now travel back several times a year. I have certain connections to the Philippines and New York city yet I remain a foreigner in both places. Being without a place has informed our idea of what cities should be. We think that foreignness is what binds us. We are all slightly unmoored. Our prescription for the future of our profession is to practice in this hyperlocal style through our shared reality of exile.

The place
has affected our view of the future.  Drifting
Colonial powers crossed it, Pirates patrolled its showers
The Filipino is predisposed to diaspora.
We are in brooklyn. Like many studios in the city we been host to architects from around the world. We have sought jobs

Our methodology is informed by the loose

Our practice has evolved in tandem with our knowledge of this country.
The said archipelago has more than  7,000 islands making it the second largest in the world.

Economic dependency


A story of development based on the reality of a service economy. In other words, products were less important than the cultivation of personal ties
Our relationship to t

We have explored  some of its geographies but remain humbled by its dispersed reality. Everything we have learnt about this country has informed our practice.


Collection of tribes
Loose filial structure
Branching associations.