"What is your reference for the space program?" In a Philippine thesis defense, that is usually the first question a panel asks about the program, and often the first question of the whole defense.
It comes first because it is the one part of a thesis a panel can actually check. Your massing involves taste, and a reasonable defense covers most objections to it. A program is different. Every area in it is a claim, and a panel member who has designed that building type knows when a claim is wrong. If the program has no references, the rest of the defense is spent on the back foot.
The question has two halves, and a panel checks both. The first is the list: where did this set of rooms come from? The second is the size: where did each room's parameters come from, and is the room too large or too small for what happens in it? This guide covers both, and the follow-ups that come once they are answered.
"Our references" is not an answer
Most students answer by naming a book or a precedent for the whole program. The panel then picks one row, usually a room that looks too big or too small, and asks again. That is where a single blanket reference falls apart, because no one source sized every room in your building.
The answer a panel wants is row by row:
- This accessible toilet is 1.80 by 1.80 meters, because that is the minimum
cubicle in the 2024 amendment to the Accessibility Law's rules.
- This operating room is sized from the Department of Health planning and
design guidelines for hospitals.
- This reading room is sized from a seat count I worked out from the enrollment
figures.
Three rows, three different kinds of source, each one checkable.
Four kinds of reference, and what each one can carry
Every area in a thesis program should trace back to one of these. Know which one applies to each row before the defense, not during it.
Kind of reference, Example, What it can justify
A regulation, National Building Code (Presidential Decree 1096), Accessibility Law (Batas Pambansa 344), Fire Code (Republic Act 9514), Minimum sizes, heights, clearances and exits. Floors, not targets.
A building-type standard, Department of Health planning and design guidelines for hospitals; Department of Education minimum standards for school buildings, Which rooms a building of that type needs, and for some types their areas and relationships
A precedent, Two or three built examples of your type, with published areas, What a normal total, room count and efficiency look like
Your own calculation, Staff count, seat count, equipment list, user projection, Rooms specific to your site and your brief
Find the standard for your building type first
Of the four, the building-type standard is the one students most often skip, and the one that saves the most work. Many Philippine agencies publish a standard for the buildings they license or accredit, and some of them are, in effect, a ready-made room list: every space the building must have, often with a minimum area and a required location.
Building type, Agency, Document, What it gives you
Hotel, resort, apartment hotel, Department of Tourism, National Accommodation Standards (Memorandum Circular 2024-0002, amended by Memorandum Circular 2025-0001), with an accreditation checklist and a star-rating checklist for each type, The facilities required at each level, and minimums for the most common room type: at least 14 square meters in a hotel or resort and 20 in an apartment hotel, counting the bathroom and any veranda
Hospital and other health facilities, Department of Health, Planning and Design Guidelines for Hospitals and Other Health Facilities (Annex B of Administrative Order 2016-0042), A table of areas room by room, the zoning of departments, and stated relationships
Public school, Department of Education, Department of Education Order 64, series of 2017, "Establishing the Minimum Performance Standards and Specifications for DepEd School Buildings", The standards the Department's own school buildings are designed to
District, city or municipal jail, Bureau of Jail Management and Penology, Minimum Standards for the Design of BJMP Jails (Version 1.0, 2018), Space by space: where it goes, its minimum area for each jail size, and how many are needed
Residential care center, Department of Social Welfare and Development, The assessment tool for accrediting residential centers (2022), What an accredited center's bedrooms, toilets, kitchen and ventilation must provide
Airport, Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, Manual of Standards for Aerodromes, Runways, taxiways, aprons and other airside requirements. It has no room schedule for the terminal building, whose rooms are usually sized from a forecast of peak passenger demand.
The table is a starting point, not a complete list. To find the standard for a building that is not on it, work through these steps.
- Ask who lets the building operate. The agency that licenses, accredits
or permits a building type is usually the one that publishes its standard. A hotel answers to Tourism, a hospital to Health, a city or municipal jail to the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology.
- Search that agency's issuances, not the open web. Use the words agencies
actually use: "minimum standards", "planning and design guidelines", "accreditation checklist", "licensing requirements", "assessment tool".
- Treat checklists as gold. An accreditation or inspection checklist is,
literally, the list of things an inspector looks for in the building. Each line that names a space or a size is a row in your program with its reference already attached.
- Get the current version and its amendments. Agencies amend by circular.
The Department of Tourism standard, for example, was issued in 2024 and amended in 2025. Read the amendments with the original, and cite both.
- Download it from the agency. A reposted copy on a document-sharing site
may be an old version or a partial one. Cite the official text, with the item or section number.
- Note what it does not cover. Most standards are silent on some rooms.
Where yours is, say so in the reference column and size the room from precedents or your own calculation instead.
Where no Philippine standard exists for your building type, international guidance can fill the gap, as long as you label it. The International Committee of the Red Cross, for instance, publishes "Water, sanitation, hygiene and habitat in prisons: supplementary guidance" (2012). A panel will accept a foreign source that you present as foreign and explain why you used it. It will not accept one passed off as local.
Three cautions about all of these references.
A regulation sets a floor. Section 806 of the National Building Code lets a bath and toilet be as small as 1.20 square meters, with a least dimension of 0.90 meters. That is the smallest the code allows, not a toilet anyone should draw, and it is nowhere near an accessible toilet. A program built entirely from code minimums describes a legal building nobody could use. Saying so yourself, before the panel does, is worth a great deal.
Check the edition. Codes are amended. The rules of the Accessibility Law were amended in 2024, and the accessible toilet cubicle is now at least 1,800 by 1,800 millimeters (Appendix A, Section C, Item 6.3.a). Older handbooks, older theses and many websites still quote smaller figures. Cite the edition you used, and use the current one.
A reference book is a starting point, not a citation for everything. Design data handbooks are useful for a first pass, but most of the standard ones were written for other countries and other building cultures. Where a Philippine regulation or standard covers the room, cite that instead, and use the handbook for the rooms it does not reach.
The panel checks the size, not just the source
A reference tells the panel where a room came from. It does not tell them the room is the right size. Panels check that separately, and in both directions: a room too small to work, and a room too large to justify.
Every room area rests on a handful of parameters, and each one needs its own source.
Parameter, The question behind it, Where the answer comes from
Number of users, How many people use this room at the same time?, Your enrollment, staffing or visitor projection, with the method stated
Area per person, How much floor does each person need?, A regulation, a building-type standard, or a design figure you can defend
Furniture and equipment, What has to fit in the room?, An equipment list for the activity, item by item
Circulation inside the room, How much space to move around all of that?, A stated percentage
A room with a reference but no parameters is the one where a panel member says "this seems big" and you have nothing to answer with.
Testing one room both ways
Take a classroom for 40 students.
- The floor. Section 807 of the National Building Code requires at least
1.00 square meter of floor per person in a school room. With the teacher, that is 41 square meters. Below that, the room fails the code.
- The norm. The Department of Education's standard classroom is 7.00 by
9.00 meters, measured from the centers of the walls, or 63 square meters. At 40 students that is about 1.58 square meters each.
- Your figure. Suppose your classroom is 120 square meters. That is 3.00
square meters per student, nearly twice the standard. It may be right, for a studio or a flexible learning room, but have the reason ready, because the panel will divide the area by the head count too.
Three quick checks catch most size problems before the panel does.
- Divide the area by the users and compare the result with your reference.
A per-person figure far from the reference is the row they will pick.
- Compare it with the same room in your precedents. If your room is twice
the size of the equivalent room in all three buildings, you need a reason.
- Draw the furniture in at scale. A room that is too small shows itself at
once: the beds do not fit with their clearances, or the door swings into the desk. A room that is too large shows itself too, as floor with nothing on it.
Build it in this order
Start with precedents, not a room list. Find two or three real buildings of your type with published areas. Record their gross areas, their room counts and their efficiency. You are not copying them. You are finding out what normal looks like, so that if your own total comes out at half or double, you find out now rather than in front of the panel.
List every space, including the boring ones. The rooms nobody asks for are the rooms that get forgotten: staff toilets, janitor's closets, electrical and data risers, waste holding, a loading point. They are not optional extras. The Department of Health area table, for one, lists a waste holding room and a janitor's closet alongside the operating rooms.
Give every row a reference before you give it a number. Write the source first and the area second. If you cannot name a source for a row, that row is the one the panel will pick, so either find one or work it out from a stated count.
Size each room from its parameters, then test it. Users, area per person, furniture and circulation, each with its source. Then run the three checks above on every room, not just the large ones.
Group into departments. This is where the program becomes a structure, and where adjacency starts to matter.
Add circulation explicitly, and say what factor you used. Do not fold it silently into the room areas. State it, so that the net area and the gross area are both visible and the panel can see you know the difference.
The follow-up questions
Once the reference question is answered, three more tend to follow. Prepare them with the same care.
- "Why is this next to that?" Asked about an adjacency that looks odd, and
sometimes about one that looks obvious.
- "Is this the whole building?" Meaning: where is the circulation, the
plant, the structure? Are you presenting a net area as if it were gross?
- "What did you leave out?" Meaning: does your building have toilets,
risers, a janitor's closet and somewhere for deliveries, and did you think about them or forget them?
The second and third are answered by the order above. The first needs its own work.
Decide the adjacencies before you draw
Most thesis programs are a table of rooms and areas. The relationships live in the plan, which means they were decided while drawing and cannot be examined on their own.
Do the matrix. Put every space on both axes and decide every pair. For a forty-space program that is 780 pairs, which is why it rarely gets done by hand, and why doing it at all sets your submission apart.
What you get for it is an answer to "why is this next to that?" with a reason behind it. "The matrix required the records room adjacent to administration and separated from the public waiting area" is a different class of answer from "it seemed to make sense there".
Give the adjacency a reference too, where one exists. Some standards state relationships outright. The Department of Health guidelines say the nursery shall be separate from the delivery room but immediately accessible from it, and that toilets shall be immediately accessible from rooms and wards. A pair backed by a line like that is a citation, not a preference.
The matrix also catches the pairs you would never have drawn a line between. Clean and dirty stores usually sit far apart on a bubble diagram, so no line is drawn, so the separation is never written down as a requirement. In a matrix that pair has a cell like every other.
Present it as three pieces of evidence
The schedule, with a reference column. This is the highest return per minute in a thesis program. It turns every area from an assertion into a citation, and it answers the panel's first question before it is asked.
The matrix, as evidence that the relationships were decided rather than drawn.
The bubble diagram, as the readable summary. This is the one that goes on the board, and it should be the last of the three you make, not the first.
One note on citing. If you build the program in a tool, Adjacency Lab included, cite the code or standard itself from its official text, and cite the tool only for the work you made with it. A panel wants to see that you read the regulation. The Learning Center guide on citing in a thesis covers the format.
Two mistakes worth avoiding
Presenting net area as the building. Suppose your schedule totals 1,200 square meters and your plan covers 1,700. If the schedule does not say so, a panel will assume you do not know the difference. State both, with the factor between them.
One reference for the whole program. A single precedent or a single handbook listed at the bottom of the schedule tells the panel you have not checked any individual row. They will check one for you.
Before the defense
Print the schedule. Pick five rows at random. For each one, say out loud what the reference is, which edition, how the number follows from it, and what the room comes to per person.
If one of the five has no answer, fix that row and pick five more. Keep going until every draw has an answer, because the panel's draw will not be the one you practiced.