bahay

Bahay na bato (Filipino for "stone house"), also known in Cebuano as balay na bato or balay nga bato and in Spanish as casa Filipino, is a type of building originating during the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. It is an updated version of the traditional bahay kubo of the Christianized lowlanders, known for its use of masonry in its construction, using stone and brick materials and later synthetic concrete, rather than just full organic materials of the former style. Its design has evolved throughout the ages, but still maintains the bahay kubo's architectural principle, which is adapted to the tropical climate, stormy season, and earthquake-prone environment of the whole archipelago of the Philippines, and fuses it with the influence of Spanish colonizers and Chinese traders. It is one of the many architecture throughout the Spanish Empire known as Arquitectura mestiza. The style is a hybrid of Austronesian, Spanish, and Chinese; and later, with early 20th-century American architecture, supporting the fact that the Philippines is a result of these cultures mixing together. Its most common appearance features an elevated, overhanging wooden upper story (with balustrades, ventanillas, and capiz shell sliding windows) standing on wooden posts in a rectangular arrangement as a foundation. The posts are placed behind Spanish-style solid stone blocks or bricks giving the impression of a first floor, but the ground level is actually storage rooms, cellars, shops, or other business-related functions. The second floor is the elevated residential apartment, as it is with the bahay kubo. The roof materials either tiled or thatched (nipa, sago palm, or cogon), with later 19th-century designs featuring galvanization. Roof styles, traditionally high pitched with, or gable roof, Hip roof, East Asian Hip roof, simpler East Asian hip-and-gable roof, Horses for carriages were housed in stables called caballerizas.

It was popular among the elite or middle-class. The 19th century was the golden age of these houses, when wealthy Filipinos built them all over the archipelago.
The same architectural style was used for Spanish-era convents, monasteries, schools, hotels, factories, and hospitals, and with some of the American-era Gabaldon school buildings, all with few adjustments. This architecture was still used during the American colonization of the Philippines. After the Second World War, construction of these houses declined and eventually stopped in favor of post-World War II modern architecture.
Today, these houses are more commonly called ancestral houses, due to most ancestral houses in the Philippines being of bahay na bato architecture.

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