Juan Macías was the Augustinian friar who drew the stone church of San Agustín inside the walls of Manila, begun in 1586 after two earlier timber-and-thatch churches on the same ground had burned. His brief was structural before it was decorative: to build something that would outlast the earthquakes and typhoons that had already destroyed most of what the Spanish had put up in Luzon. He specified thick adobe-stone walls, massive buttresses and a barrel vault carried on transverse arches, and the building has survived every major Manila earthquake since, including 1645, 1863 and 1880. Macías died before the church was declared finished in 1607; the Augustinians formally recorded him afterwards as the builder of the edifice.
