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