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What becomes clear is that Filipinos are not foreign to painting with an international palette. After all, our first batch of architects were Filipinos who, by will or some force, were flung to a foreign land, acquainted with a grammar of style not indigenous to their own, and able to bring it home as cultural pasalubong. What is less clear is why these 20th-century buildings feel closer to a Filipino identity than the similarly globalized buildings of today. In the case of the Nakpils and the Mapúas of the time, their exodus appeared to add texture to Filipino architecture. In today’s experience, a trip overseas (or a look around the Internet) may inform the next mall design, but it will be at the expense of diluting a distinct local architectural identity.

Maybe it’s not in the buildings, but in the question that the clues reveal themselves. Asking what “Filipino” is supposed to look like invites someone else to make your case. And our culture being as soluble to external influences as it is, it just makes us more inclined to assimilate rather than cultivate. While there’s nothing wrong with elevating Filipino architecture to the global arena, it is up to us to break away from our postcolonial habit of looking to the outside world to pattern what our identity is meant to look like. I suppose the dream is to define a certain architectural vernacular that reconciles our cultural ambiguity in parameters that would be recognizable as “Filipino” from both local and international points of view. Perhaps, when it is my turn for my own homecoming, I’ll be closer to concluding my identity crisis. But until then I remain, like our nondescript building facades, neither here nor there.