Ayala Triangle Gardens (ATG) is a mixed-use development sitting at the northern end of a landmark site known as the Ayala Triangle, located in the centre of Makati City, Manila’s foremost CBD area. Once home to the former Nielson Field, metro Manila’s 1930s-era main airport, the privately-owned site remained undeveloped until relatively recently and had come to be seen by the public as something of an open-access oasis within the CBD.

One of the development priorities for Ayala was to preserve and integrate the site’s natural landscape by occupying a minimal footprint substantially lower than was available to them. One way to accomplish this was to establish a compressed plot delineation at the northern tip of the plot, away from the urban jungle space. As a result, the master plan of the new development within ATG-North limited its floor area ratio (FAR) to 8, its building footprint to 17% relative to the whole Ayala Triangle Gardens, and, with the recent completion, complemented the existing landscaped park to achieve a total of 3-hectares accessible for public use. Among other things, the park features grand public staircases, a sunken amphitheatre, and landscaped civic spaces.

For ATG’s built area, the developer has constructed a high-specification, 40-storey office tower, a 23-storey luxury hotel (which has yet to open), and a 4-storey lifestyle-oriented mall. The buildings have leveraged a unique podium design that integrates sloped facades doubling as green lawns. Office floor plates are column free and range in size from 1900 to 2100 square meters, and the building is LEED Gold, while also aiming for WELL Gold certification, with high quality air filtration systems, rainwater collection, and water efficient fixtures. Unusually for major Manila buildings, car parking is situated underground, allowing that the first four floors of the built space to be as public as possible, with a well-appointed atrium and retail facilities.

Convenient access was another priority. According to one juror: “The permeability with the surrounding area is quite remarkable – they have a pass-through, weather-protected, 24-hour, passageway between the two major streets and a large berm with multiple levels of pedestrian access to the park that essentially lets the park ride up into the building.” The space between the office and hotel buildings is also publically accessible at ground level, sweeping pedestrians through a middle space and connecting to surrounding streets through an integrated underground passageway.

As a final acknowledgement of the site’s historic significance, developers have also retained various heritage components in the form of the former Nielson Field control tower – now reinvented as a two-story restaurant – as well as the old Makati Stock Exchange building, a brutalist 8-storey structure from 1967 designed by famed Filipino architect Leandro Locsin. Architects SOM have also incorporated hammered stone and concrete application at ground level of the newly built development to match the brutalist theme, which was a common design philosophy in Manila during the 1960s.

View all thirteen winners for the 2022 ULI Asia Pacific Awards for Excellence.