G1 Lodge
MICROHOTEL
Located at a prominent location at the top of Session Road, at the heart of Baguio City’s central business district, on a small 200 m² lot, the building is shaped to maximize daylight and natural ventilation, slowly tapering into light wells on the northern side.
Baguio City has always been known as a major tourist destination and a hotspot for development mainly because of its climate and the unique culture, both indigenous and modern, that thrives within the area. There is now a question whether the identity of the culture of Baguio still exists amidst the saturation of foreign and contemporary ideas. With the existence of the past and the present, Baguio City stands in between both timelines. What makes Baguio architecture? G1 is a project that aims to leverage and possibly transcend this contemporary condition by making use of familiar local and borrowed ideas and infuse it in an explorative creative process—that encourages critical thinking in the state of the culture and architecture in Baguio City—one that involves the abstraction of past forms present in the local culture as an attempt to create new forms that will redefine its architecture.
The interior of the hotel was designed with the idea of modernizing Cordillera architecture and interiors, deviating from literal translations of past forms and patterns just what has been generally practiced in the past. The execution of this idea led to the abstraction of indigenous forms with the use of local construction and artisan techniques and materials.
This hotel lobby showcases an undulating ceiling that represents an inversion of the Cordillera terrain while a portion of lobby interior walls serves as both an extension and a contrasting element of the exterior and the lobby interior
