Description of the attraction
At the corner of Escolta and William Burke Streets in Manila's Santa Cruz district stands a magnificent neoclassical house, the Regina Building, built in 1934. Its architect was Juan Luna's son Andrés Luna de San Pedro. The building is surrounded on all sides by streams, and the Estero de la Reina flows right behind it - perhaps it was from the name of this stream that the building got its name.
Regina Building was originally built as a commercial building. Since 1934, one of the first Philippine insurance companies, the Provident Insurance Corporation, was located here. The building was later bought by the De Leon family, who added a fourth floor to it and carried out a small renovation under the direction of Fernando Ocampo, a pioneer of Filipino Art Nouveau architecture.
Despite the change in ownership, the building continued to be a commercial building - it still housed the offices of insurance companies, since the Santa Cruz area was in those years the main financial center of Manila. Today, the offices of freight forwarding companies are located here.
The Regina Building is said to be one of the first buildings in the Philippines to be built of reinforced concrete, a technology that the Americans introduced to islands prone to frequent earthquakes. The original architectural style in which the building was made was also brought from America - a mixture of neoclassicism and art deco. The Central Post Office, the National Museum and the Department of Finance and Tourism are built in the same style in Manila.
