A CITY BEAUTIFUL

At the beginning of the 20th century, American architect and city planner Daniel Burnham’s plan for Manila held the promise of a "City Beautiful." The Burnham plan for Manila had inherent potential for the improvement of life and infinite possibilities for a people longing for liberation from the shackles of oppression and economic deprivation.

The story of the Burnham plan for Manila is told in a new exhibit "A City Beautiful: The Burnham Plan for Manila," which will open at the Metropolitan Museum on Tuesday, July 2. The exhibit delves into the history of Manila, the birth of the Burnham plan, the designers behind it, the plan’s gradual implementation, the outcome, and finally, its demise.

Although the legacy of the Burnham plan lives with us until today, there remains the vexing notion of what Metropolitan Manila could have evolved into if all phases of this plan were implemented. To this day, it remains unfulfilled and incomplete, a dream that was curtailed in mid-flight. The exhibit hopes to revive this vision, as the first step in improving the future is to understand the past.

We take a peek at the narrative of the exhibit with excerpts below:

Two Settlements And A Grid

The story of Manila starts with pre-Hispanic Manila, made up of two settlements on opposite banks at the mouth of the Pasig River: Tondo (or Tundok) on the north and Manila (or Maynilad) on the south bank. These thriving settlements date from the 1300s and had evolved social, political organization with two rajahs, lakandula and sulayman, holding court by the 1500s. In 1571, despite much resistance, the settlements fell to Spanish forces led by Miguel Antonio de Legazpi. The original bamboo palisades were replaced by stone and this walled enclave became the Intramuros. In it lived the ruling peninsulares, the influential clergy, and a small-numbered elite, the insulares (local-born Spanish). The city’s existence depended on the capital and power inside the city as well as the labor and entrepreneurial acumen of those living and working outside. Enclaves of the sangleys (Chinese), the Japanese, and the local main population were located extramuros (outside the walls).

The walls of the Intramuros, along with the cuadricillo (grid) of streets and a basic drainage system, were the main contributions to Manila’s urban form and function. The various other necessities of life in the city were either minimally provided or, as in the matter of health and education, taken up by the religious orders.

Towards the end of the Spanish era, the city’s population had reached 200,000. The city’s growth was a result of natural increases and migration due to improved commerce – a result of the opening up of the Philippines to the world market in 1834. In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal pushed this growth further. Urbanization spilled over the old walls and into the various arrabales (suburbs) of Binondo, San Nicolas, Santa Ana, San Miguel, Paco, Ermita, and Malate, each one developing a distinct flavor and function. Most were residential but Binondo and San Nicolas were of mixed use.

Aside from the physical constraints in the city, there was the brewing popular discontent with the colonial rule of Spain. Tributes and forced labor, friars’ abuses and the general inutility of the government were burdens hard to endure without any visible compensation in improved quality of life in the city and the archipelago. An increasingly educated middle class exposed to liberal ideas from the west, combined with grass roots insurrection movements, served to instigate the Philippine revolution in the last decade of the century.

Because of these developments, the city’s infrastuctural growth was stymied. The new city tram system, as well as the new train line to the north, suspended operations and plans for expansion. A planned reclamation and ports improvement scheme was scuttled. This was the Manila that the Americans claimed in late 1898 as the capital of their nascent empire.

Manifest Destiny

The occupation of Manila and the annexation of the Philippines led to further tumult in the Filipino-American War. Despite this, the capital was quickly secured and by the end of military rule in 1901, many improvements had already been started by army engineers. The city was mapped and public works started for new city streets.

With the establishment of civil government came American business and the return of commercial activity. Commercial space, hotels, housing and religious buildings sprouted with little planning. Public and private concerns were voiced about the haphazard development of the city, which paralleled similar ones raised back in Washington DC.

Manila needed to take on a new face, one that reflected America’s growing status in world affairs. To achieve this, the city was to take the structure and sheen of a recent world’s fair and the school of planning it helped spawn – the "City Beautiful" movement.

"Make no little plans." This was the credo of Daniel Burnham. He belonged to the so-called Chicago School, which produced the skyscraper and was the leading light of the City Beautiful movement. This early city planning movement produced a monumental Washington DC, the imperious New Delhi and the fabulous form of Canberra, all magnificent capitals of their respective countries.

Daniel Hudson Burnham was born in 1855 to a world that was urbanizing rapidly because of the Industrial Revolution. The problems of pollution, traffic and human congestion, lack of basic utilities, outbreaks of disease, and general social disorder beset American cities. Architects, politicians and social reformers were alarmed by these developments and sought to find ways to cope with the deterioration of the quality of life in cities. An early answer was to provide for parks and open space. The best example of this initiative was Central Park in New York City, designed by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

The City Beautiful movement was a cultural, aesthetic, political and environmental movement that embodied the aspirations of an emerging nation to reshape its cities into beautiful, orderly, and healthy places to live in. The movement’s first landmark was the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893. The fair was dubbed "The White City" because of the predominant color of its ornate buildings. The architecture adopted for the fair was mainly neoclassic and derivatives of it. The fair’s baroque layout emphasized symmetry and order, producing a complex of buildings that elicited awe and inspiration. This power of and by design ensured that neoclassicism would almost immediately be adopted for civic architecture by Americans and thereafter for another 50 years.

The success of the fair catapulted Burnham to national fame and in 1900, the American federal government appointed Burnham to head a four-man planning commission for a major renewal of Washington DC. In the late 19th century, the original 1792 plan of Charles L’Enfant was only partially implemented and the capitol was growing in a haphazard fashion. In January 1902, they submitted a renewed vision of Washington DC that not only restored the original intent but also enlarged and improved it. It gave a monumental and elegant face to America’s increasing strength as a modern nation.

Burnham’s fame increased and in 1903 and 1904, Burnham was asked to design the cities of Cleveland and San Francisco. Soon, he would be considered to design the capital of the United States’ newest "possession" – Manila.

Manila: Like A Dream

In March 1901, Governor General William Howard Taft wrote the Secretary of War Elihu Root in Washington DC to seek the professional advice of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. for the improvement of Manila. Olmsted was contacted and told that Manila needed this improvement, justified by the prosperity already visible, as one of the consequences of the change of sovereignty. The requirements to be made are, of course, primarily utilitarian, but the city shall be at the same time made beautiful and attractive; that the material changes shall be in accordance with the dictates of good taste, and shall be credible from an artistic standpoint.

Three years later, a young Cameron Forbes was appointed as commissioner to the Philippines in charge of transportation and development. Before he left for the island, he was tasked with finding an architect to prepare plans for Manila and the new hill station of Baguio. Forbes chose Daniel Burnham, whom he had previously met and who had helped Forbes gain a government post through recommendations to President Theodore Roosevelt. The choice of Burnham was greeted with approval by many as he, by that time, was the acknowledged premier architect and planner in the United States. Burnham was, in fact, in the middle of planning the city of San Francisco.

Burnham came to Manila with Pierce Anderson and stayed six weeks from December 1904 to January 1905. They surveyed Manila and spent the Christmas week up in Baguio, staying at Cameron Forbes’ lodge. Much work was accomplished as well as a lot of socializing. Burnham’s party was accorded all the hospitality of visiting dignitaries. Burnham was much impressed by his visit and he wrote in his report that the dive into the orient was like a dream. "The lands, the people and their customs are all very strange and of absorbing interest," he gushed.

The plans were completed in transit with Pierce Anderson working on the schemes under the direction of Burnham. The two architects returned to Chicago in March1905. The plans for Manila and Baguio, as well as the written reports for the two, were prepared and submitted on June 28 to Secretary of War Taft. They were approved within two months and orders for their implementation were given immediately after.

(To be continued)

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For details on the Burnham Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, call 523-0613.

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