Biñan
— — the town that taught the boy who named the country.
Not only on a wall.
“A city in Laguna province south of Manila, set on the southern shore of Laguna de Bay. The old plaza still holds the bones of a Spanish-era town: a stone church from 1747, a few ancestral houses, a school where José Rizal sat as a ten-year-old learning Latin from Justiniano Aquino Cruz. The new Biñan is a factory town with malls and traffic, but the heritage core remembers. From the studio, a place we know by the shape its children grew into. from the studio
Biñan, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Biñan is a city in the province of Laguna on the Philippine island of Luzon, about 34 kilometres south of Manila along the southern shore of Laguna de Bay. It sits on the lakeside plain between the older lakeshore towns of San Pedro and Santa Rosa and is part of the CALABARZON region. The town was a Spanish-era visita of Tabuco before becoming a separate parish in the eighteenth century. Today it is one of the most industrialised cities in Laguna, home to several large export-processing zones, while the old town centre around the plaza preserves the Spanish-era street grid.
The stone heart of the old town is the San Isidro Labrador Parish Church, completed in 1747 and rebuilt several times since after fires and the second-world-war damage. Across the plaza stands the Alberto Mansion, the ancestral home of Teodora Alonso, mother of the Philippine national hero José Rizal; portions of the mansion were relocated and restored in recent decades. The plaza, the church, and a small clutch of bahay-na-bato houses around the square form the heritage core that the modern city has grown around rather than over.
Biñan keeps two annual rhythms. The town fiesta in honour of San Isidro Labrador falls in mid-May with processions through the plaza and the streets of the old quarter. In June the city joins the wider national observance of José Rizal's birth on the nineteenth; the boy spent more than a year here as a student in 1870 under the schoolmaster Justiniano Aquino Cruz, and the local Rizal commemorations draw schoolchildren and historians to the heritage core. Both weeks fill the plaza with food stalls, marching bands, and folk dance.