Federico Ilustre

Federico S. Ilustre (1912 to 1989) was a Filipino architect whose career was closely tied to public building in the postwar Republic. He earned his architecture degree from the Mapua Institute of Technology and became a licensed architect in 1937, after starting out in the mid 1930s as a draftsman in the office of Juan Nakpil and briefly designing furniture.

He first joined the Bureau of Public Works in 1936 and, after wartime interruption and a stint as supervising architect of the National Housing Commission, returned to the bureau in 1949 as supervising architect. As the consulting architect of its Division of Architecture, he oversaw much of the state architecture produced during the postwar years, giving many national government edifices their form.

His best known work is the Quezon Memorial Shrine, whose design won the grand prize in the 1951 national competition for a monument to the late President Manuel L. Quezon. His broader body of work spans civic and institutional buildings such as the Independence Grandstand, now the Quirino Grandstand, the former GSIS headquarters, the terminal of the Manila International Airport, and the National Planetarium.