THE LAST PROJECT OF LEANDRO LOCSIN
The Church of the Transfiguration in the Benedictine
Monastery of the Transfiguration in San Jose, Malaybalay, Bukidnon, achieves a
certain mythical status as the last project of a great man. I went to Mindanao to see it
My initial impressions of it had come from the evocative
Neal Oshima photographs in the book “The Poet of Space: Leandro V. Locsin”,
written by Arch. Augusto Villalon and published in 1996. A March 2010 conference at the Paul VI
Institute of Liturgy on the vast grounds of the monastery presented the chance
to see the last church, and presumably the last structure, that the late
Leandro Locsin, National Artist for Architecture, had designed.
There are actually two monastery complexes on the
property. The “old” monastery is only 27
years old while the “new” monastery, designed by Arch. Locsin, is 15 years
old.
The conference on church architecture took place at the
“old” monastery but we had four opportunities to travel to the “new” monastery to
see the Locsin structure. It was
providential that we would first arrive at the “old” monastery because it
turned out to be a reference point for the Locsin structure. I was struck by the resemblance of the
structures there to the new church that I had seen in Arch. Villalon’s book.
The old monastery was designed by the late Cecilio Maceren,
a Cagayan de Oro architect whose work deserves more recognition. He arranged three steep pyramids of varying
sizes around a courtyard. The largest
pyramid is the chapel (where the conference took place), followed by the
dormitory and the library. The
processional approach up the driveway rewards one with an exceptional orchestration
of views, the kind of architectural cinematography we do not often see these
days.
The three pyramids represent the three tents mentioned in
Gospel narratives of the miracle of Jesus Christ’s transfiguration, when the
apostles Peter, James and John witnessed Moses and Elijah appearing with Jesus. Peter had said “Let us build three tents
here.”
Catholics commemorate the Feast of the Transfiguration on
August 6 every year. On that day in
1981, in the company of his Benedictine companions and after a long search for
an ideal monastery site, Malaybalay Bishop Prelate Francisco Claver, SJ,
declared “Let us make three tents here”.
Maceren’s monastery complex was inaugurated on August 6,
1983. It did not take long before word
spread of the chanted liturgies taking place in its acoustically perfect
chapel. Small groups grew into
overflowing crowds of visitors who traveled great distances to hear the
Benedictines pray. The need for more
space became apparent. The chapel would
need to become a church.
Almost ten years later, and with the help of industrialist
Manuel Agustines, the Benedictine monks availed of the services of Arch. Locsin
to design a new church and monastery. In
the transfer from the old to the new monastery, Arch. Locsin brought with him
the idea of the pyramid. The three tents
of Maceren became the one tent of Locsin. The iconic image of Locsin’s church
is rooted in precedent, in the most profound and resolute way.
It is interesting to come to Malaybalay and see the context
of a last work, not just the immediate physical landscape of Maceren’s three
tents, but also the landscape of Locsin’s accomplishment. Clearly the steep roof floating majestically over
the ground plane was an archetype central to Arch. Locsin’s imagination. But he had never, as far as this author can
recall, demonstrated the actual archetype in its essential form, until
Malaybalay. Numerous projects
demonstrated the notion of the floating object, but the object was rarely a
pyramid. The National Arts Center on Mt.
Makiling, Los Banos, Laguna, demonstrates the diagram, but in truncated form
since the roof stops short of reaching its peak.
Locsin’s original plan diagram is very simple: a square 18 meters wide, centered under a
pyramidal roof 25 meters wide. Six giant
steel girders at each side of the square plan project at a 45 degree angle to meet
their counterparts. The difference
between 25 and 18 is 7, divided into two ambulatories, or verandas, of 3 ½
meters width each. This ambulatory
provides a transition between inside and outside, a gracious gesture that Arch.
Locsin often used, while also creating a shadow-rich recess that permits the
roof volume to float. The architectural
drawings showed sliding glass doors defining the interior space, surrounded on
all four sides by an ambulatory, but these doors had not yet been installed
when the photographs in Arch. Villalon’s book were taken.
The new church is about a kilometer’s walk from the Maceren
monastery. The road curves through trees
and clearings in the trees, so the processional approach achieves a dynamic
quality. The parallax of Maceren’s three
tents becomes the parallax of Locsin’s church in the midst of the Malaybalay
landscape, including the mountain ranges in the distance. It also occurs to one in the course of that
walk that Maceren’s three tents become Locsin’s one tent in rudimentary explication
of the Trinity.
That reverie is interrupted when one gets close to the
building by the realization that the roof is not floating. Instead of a recess between roof and ground
plane, there is tinted glass in both fixed and sliding analok glass frames
hugging the line of the perimeter, visually bringing the roof down to earth. The ambulatory is gone. The visitor is thus thrust immediately
inside.
The ceiling, at 18 meters, is clad entirely in horizontal
wood planks, separated by the black steel girders that carry the load of the
roof. The wood ceiling casts a warm
glow. Near the center of the space, a
large boulder, found not far from the site, is used as the altar table. The lectern is a gnarled tree trunk adapted
to exalted use. Liturgical norms
stipulate that the altar table and the lectern be of the same material, but in
this case, the defiance works to liturgical advantage. The archetypal roof provides archetypal
shelter to an elemental rock and an elemental tree. It is back to basics, in a way that takes us
back to our beginnings in the deep recesses of time.
Dom Columbano Adag, OSB, who had been in charge of
construction prior to his retirement, explained that the interior space needed
to absorb the ambulatory. Benedictine
monasteries were often the seeds of urban development in Europe. Where a monastery was established, a
community eventually flourishes. At
Malaybalay, the community is in the form of hundreds of visitors who fill the
church on Sundays and holidays, and spill outside. The overflowing crowds at the Maceren chapel have
become overflowing crowds at the Locsin church.
Tall Indian trees in one straight line act as a barrier
between the church and the monastery.
Dom Columbano was kind enough to give me a tour of the new monastery,
normally closed to outsiders. A series
of arcaded courtyards, the monastery is still a work in progress, as about a
quarter of Arch. Locsin’s original monastery plan waits for funding. But what has been built so far demonstrates a
subtle Japanese influence, a quality of quietude that Dom Columbano and his
brethren continue to find conducive to their way of life.
Whereas the church building has no walls, except at the
sanctuary, the monastery in turn is defined by them. White masonry blocks of a lime-and-cement mixture
were manufactured on site to become the basic building block. The dynamic quality of Maceren’s monastery is
supplanted by the serene rectilinearity of Locsin’s. Whereas Maceren’s three tents are in some
sort of confraternity, Locsin’s design places the church in clear supremacy
over the monastery, which recedes into the background. Only the bell tower competes for visual
attention, seeming to mediate between the monastery and the church.
I suspect that it takes at least four visits to begin to
understand any space of quality. I
realized this in Malaybalay. If I were
to have written this article after the first two visits, I would not have been
able to relate the space to notions of the sacred, for the simple reason that I
could not bridge the gulf between Oshima’s photographs and the reality of the
vanished ambulatory. I am therefore
grateful that circumstances permitted me to witness the morning and evening
prayers of the monks. In both cases, the
liturgy of communal prayer helped me to understand the space.
On the last full day of our visit to Malaybalay, a few of us
had gathered in the pre-dawn darkness to join the monks in their 5:00 a.m.
Laudes, the prayers chanted before sunrise.
The pyramidal shape of the roof seemed acoustically perfect for the
Benedictine chants. Laudes was followed
by mass, and at the moment when the priest was raising his arms to consecrate
the host, the waking sun was beginning to shoot its first rays over the lid of
the distant mountains, washing the altar rock with its concurring light.
Our last visit the church was for the 5:00 p.m. vespers.
In the last chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead
Revisited”, the protagonist describes the flickering of the tabernacle light in
the chapel of an ancient English Catholic family that he was revisiting after
many years. “Something quite remote from
anything the builders intended has come out of their work…a small red
flame...It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and
there I found it this morning, burning anew…”
As incense smoke rose in an S curve by the side of the altar
rock heading towards the dark apex of the ceiling, this last chapter came to
mind, as a kind of summation of my visit here.
This was the same smoke that rose by the side of many other altars, many
hundreds of years ago, in many other places.
There was a power outage here in the gathering dusk of Mindanao, and as
vespers were ending, the sun brought its diminishing light only to that smoke.
Arch. Locsin’s Church of the Transfiguration was completely
one with nature and with the liturgy.
(Published in BluPrint June 2010)
(photo from "Leandro Valencia Locsin: Filipino Architect" by Jean-Claude Girard, Birkhauser, 2022)
