Picture your earliest memories. Can you recall the first house you lived in? The floor where you took your first steps?

Aya Maceda speaks in vivid detail of her family home in Quezon City: a collaborative effort by her mother, Teresita Gimenez-Maceda, and architect Jesus Gueco. “The whole house just breathed,” she says. “I remember the sense of exhale as you entered, being cocooned in this warm, bright space.”

Shaded under a large old talisay tree, its robust adobe-clad entrance offered a welcome arrival. A broad timber door opened into a thoughtfully planned inner sanctum, with narra and kamagong hardwood floors and walls. Places to gather and connect segued naturally into spots for quiet solitude. Bedrooms were positioned around a light-filled, double-height courtyard, inundated with greenery.

The house brimmed with Filipino art, objects Teresita collected in her travels, as an author and professor of Philippine Studies and Literature. Nicknamed Mapayapa, this peaceful environment instilled an early appreciation for space in young Aya, sparking a lifelong fascination for Indigenous heritage, design and creative expression. After 43 years in the Gimenez-Maceda family and with her mother’s passing, the house was recently sold. But the lessons learned within its walls remain alive in every project.

“Thinking of the values I seek to apply in my work, there is a direct line to my childhood home. I often find myself returning to it,” says Aya. “Our perimeter garden was full of orchids and ferns. My dad Vic had a habit of talking to plants... now I find myself doing that, too.” Fond memories of home served as a comforting anchor, as Aya’s physical base moved with her globetrotting architectural career.

Leaving Manila in 2000 after securing a two-year fellowship at a prestigious firm in Singapore, Aya then spent a decade working as an architect in Sydney. While travelling, she met her husband Kurt Arnold, and following the birth of their son, the pair began to consider a sabbatical in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York. A compelling factor in the move Stateside was Aya’s long-held dream to study at Columbia University, to learn from the leading architects and theorists she so admired. The young family relocated to the Big Apple to pursue this life-changing, challenging new chapter.

“After working in the profession for 12 years, the return to academia changed the way I thought about my purpose,” says Aya. “It made me want to work in a more multifaceted way—as an architect, a social advocate and an academic. I was curious about developing a body of work that was rooted in the social engagement of architecture.”

In 2013, in the same month she graduated from Columbia, a Sydney contact put forward a well-matched project, and Aya found herself at the helm of her own ship much earlier than she had envisioned. “Going out on my own was a project of autonomy,” says Aya. “I wanted to break away and find my own voice—be in a space where I could function freely as a creative.”

During this time, friend and furniture designer Milo Naval suggested a collaborative project, creating the meditative Siama Hotel on a coconut farm in Sorsogon. Placing local craftsmanship and artisan detailing at the fore, the boutique accommodation presents a tangible connection to community and nature. This considered, relationship- driven work aligns with Aya’s intent, to design as a medium for positive change.

With no network in New York, and only one project under her belt, her practice grew slowly, client by client. Soon, Aya built up a portfolio of memorable residences, art studios, community spaces and cultural projects. A bubbling aspiration to collaborate with like- minded creatives led to a partnership with architect James Carse, and the genesis of the award-winning ALAO in 2018. With James’ expertise colored by his New Orleans background, the two find dynamic professional synchronicity in “a type of tropical modernism.”

“We both subscribed to a humanist approach to design, and aimed to create architecture that allows people to feel joyful, and connected to a place,” says Aya. This lies at the core of one of the practice’s most inventive and sustainably-driven civic projects, the floating parks of Pasig.