The UPs & downs of Diliman

Coming home is always a good feeling. I travel a lot and it is always a relief to go back to Manila and to family. But the welcome that our cities and suburbs give has deteriorated to the point that you often feel like getting back on the plane to wherever it was you journeyed to in the first place. (Unless of course it was from a war zone, which in any case parts of Metro Manila closely resemble anyway.)

There are few special places in the metropolis that still give me a feeling of welcome. One of these is the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines. Many alumni journeyed to Diliman last Friday to a homecoming dinner and celebration. The annual homecoming held at the Alumni Center was the first time for many to experience the campus once again and compare the "then and now" of this educational landmark district.

I had featured some of the elements of this "Diliman Republic" a month ago. The article focused mainly on the two most obvious landmarks – the oblation and the carillon. The homecoming gave me another opportunity to revisit other memorable structures and sites that many alumni would fondly remember.

Chapels And Jeepneys

The campus was, in fact, open to the public since the late 1940s and many of its venues for performances, its places of worship, playing fields and open green spaces were and still are enjoyed by all. Sundays of yore would see people from miles around (in the Fifties, they still used miles instead of kilometers) come to worship at the Leandro Locsin-designed Catholic chapel or the Cesar Concio-designed Protestant chapel. Both structures were of reinforced concrete in "space-age" forms that were fashionable in that era. Locsin’s was saucer-shaped while Concio’s was a hyperbolic paraboloid.

Today, these structures survive with their flock multiplied a hundredfold. So many come to worship that fences have sprung up around the Catholic one, denying the structure the elegant setting it used to have. I figure that security has become a problem, a symptom of how urbanized the campus has become.

This dark urbanity is also seen in the dark clouds of diesel fumes that the famous Ikot jeepneys spew (so much so that they should rename the campus "Spew P"). Traffic has grown so much in the campus that the Ikot jeepney service, for those alumni who have not visited recently, has been cloned to service passengers going the other way. This route is called – what else – Toki!

Checkups, Check-Outs And Central Lagoons

Beside the chapels are two other landmarks – the University Infirmary and the local shopping arcade. I remember the infirmary for the requisite medical checkup we all had to go through where everyone had to strip to have their unmentionables checked. (Being a dazed freshman I thought that it was just an oblation thing.)

The University Shopping Center used to be this ’50s-style supermarket that sprouted a mini-mall in the 1970s. The extension was promptly christened "Dilimall" and catered to student’s basic needs of fast and cheap food, Xerox, typing and binding services. The "mall" is still there; the toilets still seem to be less than well-maintained, but instead of typing services there are Internet and gaming cafes. I did not see "blue books" sold (I wonder if they’re still used for exams) but every other store sold phone cards and cell-phone accessories. This just shows you that IT is now central to student survival.

In the old days, the central thing at the UP was that huge open space between Gonzalez Hall (the library) and Quezon Hall (the administration building). The original 1939 master plan by American architect William Parsons showed this central "mall" with a huge man-made lake.

The lake was never constructed, at least to the scale intended. No romantic boating for college sweethearts, sorry. What we had instead was a lagoon, which remained fairly unused and unappreciated until it was revived by (former) Dean of Architecture Honrado Fernandez. It is a favorite spot today for both students and families.

Football, Tennis… And Oh Yes, Classes

On the opposite end of the central mall is the sunken garden. This was the venue of choice for parades and football (soccer to you Yanks). The field was meant by Parsons to be the campus "quad." In fact, the student’s center Vinzon’s Hall was built opposite it. This quadrangle was never paved or crisscrossed with walks like other famous university "quads" but it became and still is an important open space in the campus. This spatial primacy is also due to majestic acacias, which have matured (they are now half a century old) and give the "gardens" a wonderful green frame and cool shade for walking.

I walked around the campus most of the time. All my classes were walking distance from my home building Melchor Hall (College of Architecture was on the fourth and fifth floors above Engineering). The campus was meant originally to be a walking campus with pavilion-style buildings around the central loop road and mall. Today’s UP is a little too spread out for me. I see few bicycles when this would seem to be an ideal non-polluting means of transportation. (I understand that they do close the central loop to traffic on Sundays. Wonderful!)

Aside from walking, I got my exercise by playing tennis. For a number of years, the courts beside Melchor Hall were my second home. We would play until a classmate of ours would shout from the top floor of Melchor that class was about to start (no texting then). We would sneak up to class and sit in the rear where our professors would not notice we were in shorts and smelling of the sun and tennis balls.

Iced Tea And Ike

For entertainment, students and the public went to the University Theater (Villamor Hall – named after the first Filipino UP president). I used to enjoy watching shows there, with the likes of Basil Valdez – still with the Circus band – a young APO trio, the Juan de la Cruz band and a couple of others. (Which gives you an idea of what decade I went to college.) There was also a steady schedule of university events and musical competitions. (I remember singing in Spanish just to score points with my Spanish professor).

The theater had this war-vintage hangar look and no air-conditioning. Former President Dwight Eisenhower received his honorary degree from the UP in this amphitheater while I received my lessons in fooling around with the opposite sex in its parking lot (several degrees, not just honorary ones… at least that’s what I was told). The theater was renovated in the 1980s and a film center was also constructed beside it in the early ’90s. Today, it still serves the studentry and cars are still parked suspiciously even when there’s no performance.

There are many more landmarks at the UP, which we cannot all fit into this article. I do need to have something to write about next year. I’m still doing research on the golf course that used to meander about the campus, keeping it super clean and green. And who can forget the driving range with the famous Butterfly iced tea they used to serve there.

A place with great memories is always a welcoming place. It is good that UP has managed to keep fairly intact and green. The campus is straining, though, to cope with pressures from an encroaching city. Academic-unit sprawl makes student access difficult and sometimes dangerous (despite Ikot and Toki). Commercialization, deteriorating infrastructure and informal settlements are issues also affecting the campus. The UP’s budget also needs to be more welcoming to the requirements of the huge student population and the research and outreach programs of the university.

So even if it isn’t homecoming week, take a trip to a most welcoming place. Of course, any help visiting alumni offer to keep this feeling funded and frazzle-free would be most welcome, too.

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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at citysensephilstar@hotmail.com.