Juan M. Arellano trained first as a painter under Lorenzo Guerrero and Fabián de la Rosa, then went to the United States as one of the first Filipino government pensionados in architecture, studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Drexel and working for George B. Post & Sons in New York. Back in Manila he became a supervising architect at the Bureau of Public Works and produced the Beaux-Arts set pieces of the American colonial capital: the Legislative Building, the Manila Central Post Office, the Rizal Memorial sports complex. Sent back to America in 1927 to study under the theatre specialist Thomas W. Lamb, he returned a different designer, and the Metropolitan Theater of 1931 announced Art Deco in the Philippines with tropical foliage cast in concrete and stained glass.
