Emmanuel Miñana

Emmanuel "Manny" A. Miñana, born in Cebu City in 1961, earned his architecture degree from the University of the Philippines in 1984 and founded Emmanuel A. Miñana Architects (EAMA) in Manila in 1990. He is one of the leading advocates of contemporary Filipino architecture, best known for a modern reinterpretation of the bahay-na-bato that abstracts vernacular forms rather than copying them.

In 2014 Miñana became the first Filipino architect shortlisted at the World Architecture Festival, entered in the completed-buildings Villa category for Villa Marina, a home in Sta. Elena, Cabuyao, Laguna. The design paired heavy adobe-stone ground floors with open, transparent upper levels beneath wide-eaved pitched roofs on stilts, drawing on both mountainside tribal houses and the bahay-na-bato.

His practice covers residential, commercial, religious, and institutional work, with projects in the Philippines and abroad, including Bali, Hong Kong, Lake Como, and Riyadh. Miñana was the first recipient of the United Architects of the Philippines Beacon Seal of Excellence in 2020 and received the National Commission for Culture and the Arts Haligi ng Dangal citation in 2018.