My Serendra at Fort Bonifacio Global City, Taguig near Makati ** UNOFFICIAL TEST SITE

Serendra is your home in a garden

The Philippine STAR 10/02/2004

Have you ever imagined that it could be possible for you to live in a condominium building and still be able to enjoy your own garden? “The concept is a mid-rise condominium building set in a garden,” Leandro “Andy” Locsin Jr. remarked. Locsin’s architectural firm, LV Locsin Partners, is the architectural consultant for Serendra, the newest residential community development of Ayala Land Inc. (ALI) and Community Innovations Inc. (CII) at the Bonifacio Global City.

Set on a 12-hectare development site, Serendra is envisioned to be a low-density residential community with a cluster of low to mid-rise sections surrounded by open spaces, greenery, and landscaping that will occupy as much as two thirds or about 65 percent of the total area. “I think the developers are trying to break new ground in terms of a new typology for condominium design,” Locsin noted, “with a very high degree of civic-mindedness about the environment, about not over building, and being quite generous about gardens. I suppose you would feel much more human in a place like this.”

“One of the primary objectives of the project was not to go fully high-rise,” Locsin explained, “much like what you see in many European cities where mid-rise apartments have a much more human scale as opposed to he gigantic towers where you feel very detached from the ground. In this particular project, one of the points of references was really for the buyer or the resident to feel that somehow they were attached to the garden below.”

“The garden became a very prominent feature of the whole development, pocket gardens, and then the main garden in the center,” Locsin remarked. Garden-level units open out to the main gardens and terraces where you can enjoy your coffee at sunrise or cocktails in the evenings. Or if your unit is in a higher floor, you only have to go down a few flight and out into the yard, like what you might do if you lived in a house with a backyard, where you can kick a ball around or jump in a pool.

Serendra’s master plan followed European building tradition characterized by multi-level housing units that afford residents different kinds of views and wide, open space.

“Section A, in both Districts of the development, go from four stories to nine stories,” Locsin explained, “while Sections B and C of District 1 will have from nine to about 17 stories. When you look at the entire area in elevation, the building starts at a very low level where the retail area is at the center, and then sort of bend up on both sides. The building gets exponentially higher as you go outwards. There is recognition that the property is high value and people who will buy and build in the surrounding areas are not going to put low buildings. So it will be surrounded by tall buildings, which makes Serendra even more special, with its low to mid-rise feature as a very strong selling point.”

Serendra was designed by Santa Monica-based Moore Ruble & Yudell Architects (MRY). The award-winning firm was chosen for the way they handled densities in their developments, the curvilinear and serpentine buildings, the open spaces, and the clustering of building around these spaces, which they applied in Serendra. Locsin was recruited to “tie all the elements and influences into one visual whole and create an Asian-Filipino theme for the buildings.”

“The bahay na bato, the pseudo-colonial adaptation of the bahay kubo, became the source of inspiration of the architecture. We worked with MRY to develop that language,” Locsin revealed. “If you look at how it was put together, there is a tri-partite division of the architecture. You have a heavy base that is articulated in stone, and then a lighter upper body with some transparencies and cantilevers, and a pitched roof that caps the structure. It is actually a peculiar thing. You cannot do it literally because you cannot take a classical bahay na bato and stretch it out that long. It will simply look weird. The idea is to take the essence of the architectural and re-interpret it.”