A group of Thomasian architecture students bagged on Wednesday, Jan. 6, a bronze award for their proposed Pasig River project in the 2020 Architects Regional Council Asia (ARCASIA) Design Competition.
In their project titled, “Bayanihan: The Filipino Spirit of Unity Working Together to Achieve a Common Noble Purpose,” fourth-year students Timothy James Arambulo, Thomas Benjamin Intal, and Michelle Anne Tanieca proposed to revive the Pasig river as a transport hub and an urban space linked with a biking infrastructure.
“[T]he design aims to build resilient structures that connect us and improve our cities mobility to brace the unpredictable nature of our natural environment,” Arambulo, the group’s team leader, told TomasinoWeb.
Their project includes building a facility with a disinfection zone, non-contact ticketing system, terminal area, foodcourt, ferry network headquarters, and a hyperloop biking infrastructure to encourage the use of cycling and ferry systems as an alternative means of transportation in the city.

An architectural rendering of the commercial space of their project “Bayanihan: The Filipino Spirit of Unity Working Together to Achieve a Common Noble Purpose.” (Photo from Intal, Tanieca, and Arambulo)
These systems, according to Arambulo, are in place to help enforce social distancing and other pandemic regulations.
“Through creating resilient urban spaces with biking infrastructure and a revamped ferry system, it provides an alternative way to navigate the city. Keeping mobility is key to help continue the growth of [cities] under unpredictable circumstances,” Arambulo said.
This year’s ARCASIA design competition theme was titled, “Resilience by Design” which aims to address the social inequities brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pasig river
The Pasig river connects Laguna de Bay, the country’s largest lake, and Manila Bay. It is approximately 27 kilometers long and flows through the cities of Taguig, Pasig, Makati, Mandaluyong, Manila, and the municipality of Taytay, Rizal.
According to Arambulo, they want Manila mayor Isko Moreno to consider their proposed project.
“[This] can help improve their plans for PAREX (Pasig River Expressway), [which is] not necessarily a bad thing, but looking at it [from] preservation’s perspective, the skyway will ruin the Pasig river’s look,” he said.
The PAREX is a proposed elevated toll road which will be built along the Pasig river.
This joint project between the Philippine National Construction Corporation and the San Miguel Holdings Corporation aims to minimize travel time for motorists heading from Rizal to Manila and vice versa.
“The plans they were planning for the Pasig river was a skyway development; [And] I believe we commuters and Manileños have a chance to stop that from happening. Our design keeps the river intact and makes it super accessible to all bike riders and commuters,” Arambulo said.
Taking the challenge
Arambulo shared that their team was at an “extraordinary position” to initiate new ideas for a better and resilient environment.
“[T]hrough the power of collaboration in web conferencing technologies, we have surfed the web and sat through a myriad of webinars across different continents searching for new ways to embrace the unpredictable,” he explained.
Tanieca and Intal also highlighted the role of online platforms when they were crafting their project.
“Despite not having face-to-face interactions, I believe we were able to achieve our goal and our expected output with the help [of] online mediums,” Tanieca told TomasinoWeb.
Intal revealed that their brainstorming sessions were mostly done via Zoom, while they exchanged ideas through annotations.
“[W]e took inspiration from the endless online resources we found as well as webinars related to our design problem,” Intal told TomasinoWeb.
“It was a difficult process but a rewarding journey,” he added.
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