Survival often has little to do with
fitness. The caprice of circumstance and
the will of those in power can subvert the natural process of selection, so that
our battlefields are littered with the bodies of our brightest, leaving only a
few remnants to remind us of who we once were.
Seized by the Americans from its
Spanish colonizers at the turn of the 20th century, the Philippines
was romantically known as the Pearl of the Orient for its beauty and strategic
location. Its capital, Manila, was a
bastion of Western civilization in Asia, with a walled city and an elegant
array of Neo-Classical public buildings that reflected the ideals of the City
Beautiful Movement.
Due to its link with the United States,
Manila became one of the most devastated cities of WW2, second in the world only
to Warsaw. From the thriving capital of a commonwealth being groomed for
independence, Manila emerged from the war in ruins, its population decimated,
its economy shredded, its psyche forever scarred. Its ancient and beautiful walled city,
Intramuros, was razed to the ground, and a large part of its population, along
with the landmarks of their cultural heritage, lay in the rubble.
After gaining independence in 1946, the
young nation set about rebuilding its capital.
By the 1960s, symbols of hope and heroic ambition were manifest in the
city’s resurgent skyline. Efforts at
reconstruction, however, were hampered by haphazard political will. The result
was an urban environment fraught with the ills common to large cities – traffic,
overpopulation, lack of zoning – leading gradually in the late 1960s to the
exodus of the business community to the new suburb of Makati.
Still the nation’s capital and one of
the world’s most densely populated cities, Manila is now greatly changed. Its
once celebrated beauty can still be seen in hints, in grand but faded facades
amid the hodgepodge of structures that have sprung up. Too often, however, they come to light only
with public notice of their impending demolition, and momentum has started to
build toward conserving the vanishingly rare remnants of the country’s architectural
heritage.
ESCOLTA
There is a neighborhood in Manila that
may serve as a lexicon of Philippine 20th century architectural
history, its streets lined with relics of a fabled past. Once the most important district in the
country, it is now little more than a shabby byway. Yet its name resonates among the old, and
increasingly among the young who are learning of its existence. A new generation of architects is learning
lessons in sensitive climatic response and urban scale from examples there.
Escolta was the premier business and
commercial center of Manila from the late 1800s up to the early 1970s. It was, so to speak, Fifth Avenue, Wall
Street and the heart of downtown. In
this small area, some of the most architecturally significant buildings in the
city were built, to house some of the country’s most prestigious offices,
banks, and stores. Although ravaged by
war, time and neglect, some of them still stand today.
Escolta, the district, derives its name
from Escolta, the street that extends 450 meters northeast from Plaza Moraga to
Plaza Santa Cruz. The National
Historical Commission of the Philippines has officially established the borders
of the Escolta historic business district as follows: to the East, Santa Cruz
Church and Plaza Santa Cruz; to the north, Dasmarinas Street; to the West,
Muelle de Binondo; to the South, Pasig River.
CALLE ESCOLTA
One of the oldest streets in Manila,
dating back to 1594, Escolta was named after the Spanish word escoltar, “to escort”, as the Spanish
governor-general would parade with his entourage through what was the main
street of the district.
A key node of Escolta is its
intersection with Burke Street. On three corners of this intersection stand
pre-WW2 survivors, relatively intact and at various conditions of preservation;
on the fourth corner is a building from the 1960s. Their stories intertwine with those of other
buildings in Escolta, via ownership and architectural authorship. They all face each other across the
intersection in a cordial entente; the corners of the pre-war buildings are
chamfered, the shoulder of the post war building is curved.
Their names are: First United, Regina, Burke and Gonzalo
Puyat.
FIRST UNITED
The First United is today considered
Art Deco, although the term did not exist when construction was completed in
1928. This was just three years after
the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, or L'Exposition Internationale des Arts
Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, that gave Art Deco its name four
decades later. In 1928 this was not Art
Deco but the most current architecture of the time, which reflected a
fascination with the latest discoveries in art, technology, as well as
archaeology, and generated motifs that were not neoclassical.
The First United Building is five
stories tall and occupies half a city block. It was originally named the
Perez-Samanillo building, after the Manila-Barcelona family who commissioned
Andres Luna de San Pedro to design it.
Andres Luna, son of the famous painter,
Juan Luna, is one of two supremely creative Philippine architects of the period
between the two world wars (the other being Juan Arellano). His office was the training ground of Luis
Araneta, Cesar Concio, Gabriel Formoso, and Juan Nakpil, all of whom would
later become the front guard of modern architecture in the Philippines,
particularly after WW2. Nakpil in
particular was a partner in Luna’s firm during the design of First United.
The building retains many of its
original features. Double-loaded corridors surround two light wells. Near the
top of the central bay, and at the corners, the angled corbel arch that frames
the penthouse windows seems to allude to Meso-America, while the reed fluted
verticals on the rest of the façade suggest Egyptian sources, all reflecting an
autonomy from Greek and Roman precedent.
REGINA
An elegant neoclassical structure, the
Regina Building still reigns as perhaps the most elegant of the buildings on
Escolta. It serves as a model of a site
evolving over time to accommodate change.
The first three floors were designed by
Andres Luna de San Pedro, before he designed the Perez-Samanillo, and fresh
from his five year stint as City Architect of Manila (1920-24). The classical style is very much informed by
Art Noveau, evident in the façade’s organic bas relief ornamentation, as well
as the fluid forms of the wrought iron grillwork inside. Luna’s intervention would not touch the
pre-existing late-19th century structure that anchored the northeastern corner
of the block. Later, in the mid-1930s,
Fernando Ocampo replaced the northeastern corner with a neoclassical facade
that would complement the southeastern corner facade of the First United
Building across the street. The result
would be the iconic vista of two architectural “lions” guarding the entrance to
Escolta from Plaza Santa Cruz.
Ocampo also added a new fourth floor,
using this new attic course to emphasize horizontality and to reinforce the
scale of the street, even as the building was becoming taller. Like Ocampo, his client, Jose de Leon, was
from the province of Pampanga. Pampanga
sugar was the source of de Leon’s immense fortune, with which he acquired two
buildings on Escolta – the Regina and its sister building farther down the
block, the Natividad, designed by the Spanish Filipino architect, Fernando de
la Cantera. Escolta was indeed a canvass
of industrial ascendancy, narrating the story of how Philippine wealth
circulated through the 20th century.
BURKE
Built in 1918, the building is named
after the philanthropist William Burke, whose name is also carried by the cross
street. Designed by Tomas Arguelles, it boasted
the first elevator installed in the country. It survived several earthquakes
and both world wars, but was remodeled several times and, in the process,
stripped of most of its distinguishing features. Today its unadorned façade shows almost no
trace of its original character, attesting to the contemporary turn toward
pragmatic design, and to the resilience of a well-built structure.
GONZALO PUYAT
The southwest corner of this
intersection houses the Gonzalo Puyat Building of the late 1960s. It is unverified but this building is most
likely designed by National Artist Leandro Locsin, judging from the
understatement he favored. Its massive gray façade is refined and modulated by
a grid of thin vertical concrete fins projecting beyond the ground floor like
the upper story of a traditional Filipino house, in the kind of subtle
abstraction typical of Locsin.
Formerly housing a famous department
store, Syvel’s, the five-story building is now closed and abandoned.
OTHER ESCOLTA ICONS IN DANGER
CAPITOL THEATER
The Capitol Theater building is an
expressive building, its stepped profiles and deep concrete window canopies
providing rich opportunity for shadow. Juan
Nakpil designed this building in 1935, five years after he opened his office,
seven years after he assisted Andres Luna with the Perez-Samanillo three blocks
away, and ten years after he had seen the 1925 Paris exposition that gave rise
to Art Deco. Its monumental façade, with
its ziggurat-like tower over the main entrance, dominates the street. Its symmetrical tower façade is articulated
by a pair of allegorical bas-relief sculptures by Francesco Riccardo Monti, a
leading Italian sculptor who made Manila his home after escaping Fascist Italy.
In the main lobby, a wall mural
executed by titans of modern Philippine painting --Victorio Edades, Carlos
“Botong” Francisco and Galo Ocampo -- celebrated the “Rising Philippines”. It also celebrated the spirit of artistic
collaboration that permeated this project.
The national flower, the sampaguita, were used as a decorative motif for
the proscenium arch, the wrought-iron balustrade, and other interior
elements. The double-balcony theater had
eight hundred seats. Mural, decoration,
seats are now all gone, lost in an aborted attempt some years back to convert
the theater into a restaurant.
Occasional murmurs stoke fears of demolition, which would be criminal in
the light of the Heritage Law which protects the work of National Artists such
as Nakpil.
EL HOGAR
Built in 1914 on the edge of the Pasig
River, El Hogar (Spanish for “the home”) was the doyenne of what was once the
Wall Street of Manila, Juan Luna Street.
It is the oldest commercial building in the neighborhood and one of the
few remaining structures intact from the American Period. Featuring a mirador, or lookout turret, it
offered the best vantage point for observing the movement of trading ships as
they arrived at and departed from the port of Manila.
The plan of the building, designed by
Ramon de Irureta Goyena, organizes single-loaded corridors around two
courtyards joined by a lantern-like stairwell with exceptional wrought iron grillwork
and an ornate balustrade. El Hogar has a
spatial grace one rarely finds in Metro Manila today. Awning windows on the
exterior façade invite the river breezes to flow through the open corridors
into the central courtyards.
During the heyday of Escolta as the
premier business address, El Hogar was the headquarters of key corporations,
including Ayala, the company that would eventually transform the rice fields of
Makati into the nation’s business capital – and in doing so, lure the major
corporations away from Escolta, leading to its demise.
The building evolved gradually over
time. Originally four floors including a
mirador, it eventually needed to grow.
The old mirador was then expanded horizontally to become a full floor,
its features harmoniously relating to the rest of the façade, and a new mirador
was added on top, preserving the building’s countenance – and providing a
lesson in retrofitting that applies today.
The last few decades have been
ignominious for El Hogar. Its
high-ceilinged rooms became warehouse space.
Its new owners, who purchased the building in 2014, petitioned for it to
be condemned, which was granted by Manila City Hall, in the face of the nominal
protection afforded by the National Cultural Heritage Act of 2009, also known
as the Heritage Law.
The new owners, making no secret of
their intentions, put up a concrete barricade, and removed the ceremonial time
capsule and the memorial plaque to El Hogar’s founder, Antonio Melian. When its delicate wrought iron grillwork and
griffin newel posts were dismantled from the graceful staircase and hauled away
by truck “for safekeeping”, a public outcry arose, resulting in a Cease and Desist
order against the demolition in 2015.
The threats to the embattled El Hogar
have made it a lodestone of civic action and protective effort for a growing
army of Escolta champions.
PHILIPPINE NATIONAL BANK
The magisterial Philippine National
Bank, or PNB, building of 1965, designed by Carlos Arguelles, was built at a
time when the country seemed to be at the height of its powers, considered
second only to Japan in terms of its economic strength.
The building is 12 stories: a
nine-story tower sitting on a three-story podium. For all its relative height, the PNB harmonizes
with the scale of its low-rise neighborhood because of the prominence of the
podium.
Diminishing the sense of mass is the brise
soleil, or sunbreaker screen, that rests about a meter away from the inner skin
of full-height glass windows that encloses the interior. It is like the volada, or exterior layer of wood louvers and capiz shell windows
that lightly wraps the second floor of the traditional Filipino house, or the barong tagalog, the traditional men’s shirt of embroidered pineapple fiber
which floats away from the body, cooling while clothing.
In his 2004 memoir “A Passion to Build,”
the contractor David M. Consunji wrote that the PNB was perhaps “the biggest
construction project of that time, costing P21 million” with “the largest
amount of precast concrete decorative elements and the most complicated marble
work ever done in the Philippines at the time." With Alfredo Juinio as the structural
engineer, the PNB was the first building in the country to use “a waffle slab
ceiling, each slab measuring 10 meters by 10 meters,” as well as steel piles.
When PNB moved headquarters to Pasay
City in 1995, the decline of Escolta became precipitous; a tower full of
bankers had been a strong economic engine. The building was purchased by the city government,
used it as the City College of Manila for ten years, and abandoned it - left it to rot, literally - when the
college moved elsewhere. Despite the PNB’s pioneering significance, the city
government seems bent on destroying this modern Filipino icon. After a fire in 2015 damaged the upper half
of the PNB, Manila City Hall renewed its efforts to condemn the building. Citizen-led groups have mounted protests and
pleas for its possible retrofit, citing its well-configured space plan, which
is eminently suitable for adaptive reuse.
Meanwhile, demolition proceeds.
Science and technology today are able
to stabilize the most endangered of structures.
A poignant case in point is the former Product Exhibition Hall in
Hiroshima that became Ground Zero of the atom bomb drop, and later the Atom
Bomb Dome that is now part of the peace memorial. Closer to home, the Insular Life Building in
Makati, designed by Cesar Concio, from the same period of the early 1960s as
the PNB, still stands today, rehabilitated after a fire in 1971 that damaged
its upper half.
THE COMMERCIAL BANK AND TRUST COMPANY
The Commercial Bank and Trust Company
building was built in 1969, designed by Jose Maria Zaragoza, who in 2015 would
be named National Artist for Architecture.
It is the last building of any architectural significance to be built on
Escolta Street.
The building has a marvelous section
that responds with creativity to the direct sun. The six-story half cylinder results from
extruding in the round an elaborate profile.
Every contour of this mushroom-shaped section responds to the climate,
shielding the interior from the sun. The
semi-circular canopy at steet level hovers somewhere between second and third
floors. The fourth floor protrudes in a
great overhang that keeps the glass façade in shadow below, while the fourth
floor windows themselves recess deeply into the building.
At the fifth and sixth floors, the
building’s smooth plastered surface resembles a reversal of the exterior wall
of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which had opened ten years
earlier. It is not a direct copy, but an
allusion, reflecting the friendship between Zaragoza and Guggenheim Museum’s
architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Right next to Comtrust is one of the
most poignant vantage points in the neighborhood, the intersection where
Escolta meets Nueva, from where one can see the western apse of Juan Arellano’s
1926 Manila Central Post Office across the Pasig River. Two half circles confront each other across time
and a river in a dialogue that shares the narrative of our city.
CONCLUSION
The fate of Escolta and its buildings
seems to run parallel to that of Manila, a city of mixed blessings, subject to
contradictory forces – some callous and destructive, and some protective – its
mature form still in the making. Whether the once-prestigious district ever captures
a new relevance, or settles quietly into its humbled state, will depend on
which forces will eventually prevail.
First United and The Regina are intact,
thanks to the good stewardship of its owners.
One hopes that the current ownership of El Hogar transforms from mere
ownership to good stewardship. In any
case, all three of these pre-World War Two structures are standing.
The future of El Hogar is less certain,
as only the vigilance of citizen watchdog groups stands in the way of professed
intent to destroy it.
The former Comtrust Building is still
in good shape, both literally and figuratively speaking, and its distinctive
form is likely to survive, as it is currently owned and occupied by one of the
country’s major banks, Bank of the Philippine Islands. The same cannot be said of the Philippine
National Bank, the tallest building of any architectural significance on
Escolta, now being demolished by its owner, the city government of Manila.
Cities tell their stories through their
buildings. The story of Manila tells of
the meeting of East and West, and of the layers of cultural influence that
enriched this land through the centuries.
Even our ruins form part of this tale.
More tragic than a war’s aftermath is the self-destructive ignorance,
callous handling, and willful caprice of its appointed guardians and
developers, who often seem bent on destroying the little that is left of our
remaining architectural legacy.
It falls to us citizens, therefore, to
be the guardians of our own heritage, to ensure its survival. It is up to us to keep our memories alive and
our monuments standing, so that as we build our new monuments to present and
future progress, we never lose sight of the lessons and heroes of our past.
(published in the 2016 book "Muhon: Traces of an Adolescent City" that accompanied the exhibit of the same name, curated by Leandro V. Locsin Partners as the Philippines' first pavilion in the Venice Architecture Biennale)
