They Lived Here

He obtained his early education in Quiapo and Tondo, and subsequently enrolled at the Manila high School, where he graduated in 1917. He then took up engineering at the University of the Philippines. While in UP, he also studied freehand drawing, painting, and decorative arts under Fabian de la Rosa and Fernando Amorsolo, and sculpture under Maestro Ocampo. Two years later, he left for the United States and enrolled at the University of Kansas, where he obtained the degree of Bachelor of Science in civil engineering in 1922. He had already enrolled at Cornell University to pursue hydraulic engineering, when he received a wire from his uncle, Dr. Bautista Lin – who was defraying all the expenses for his studies – advising him to switch to another course. Heeding his uncle’s counsel, he sailed for France in the summer of 1925 to take up architecture at the Fountainbleau School of Fine Arts, where he received his diploma d architecture. He capped his architecture studies the following year with a master’s degree earned at Harvard University in Boston under a Joseph Evelynth fellowship. During his stay in Harvard, he entered a competition opened to the students of the Boston Institute of Technology, members of the Architects Club of Boston, and the architecture students of Harvard. He was the Harvard student who won in it.