The office villages of Makati
August 5, 2006 | 12:00am
In the 1970s, I started my professional career working in the Central Business District of Makati. The commute was five minutes from Baryo Kapitolyo in Pasig where I lived and traffic was never heavy except across the then-narrow bridge of pre-billboarded Guadalupe. Although the office I worked in was on Paseo de Roxas, what struck me as odd were the names of the two major office districts that flanked Ayala Avenue.
Legazpi Village and Salcedo Village housed dozens of pint-sized office buildings that rose up from their curved streets. They were half the height of the Ayala buildings, which were uniform at about 12 stories high (the limit in the ‘60s was about 15 stories because of fear of earthquakes – building technology has since progressed – and the proximity to the airport). I figured that maybe the areas were called villages because of their small-scaled structures and smallish network of roads.
I was wrong, of course.
The answer lay in the very success of Ayala’s Makati. But the clues were in that network of streets, the fact that both areas had central open spaces and the fact that surrounding these two were several already established residential villages – San Lorenzo, Urdaneta, and Bel-Air.
Salcedo and Legazpi Villages were actually designed and laid out as residential villages to support the central spine of Ayala Avenue, which was the only area originally meant to house multi-story office buildings. The two were to be the last in a sequence of "subdivided" housing (or "homesite," to use the term then prevalent) developments that complimented the live-work-play new suburb of Makati.
The background story is one of Ayala’s Makati and the strategy that the original planners led by Don Alfonso Zobel, Don Enrique Zobel, Colonel McMicking and Col. Jaime Velasquez took to develop the 1,650 hectares of former Jesuit-held swamp and marginal agricultural land.
They had taken the tack to develop a complete new satellite city with industry, offices and housing all connected via well-paved, well-lit, quick-draining roads. Few today remember that Makati in the ‘50s and early ‘60s was the most industrialized town in the province of Rizal (Makati was still a municipality and Metropolitan Manila as an entity was still decades away so any place not a city was under the control of the provincial government). The developers knew that people would move to Makati if work was nearby in factories, if the administrative offices of these plants were a few hundred meters away and if housing was a short hop away in your Dodge, Chevy or Chrysler.
Makati offered an alternative to war-damaged Manila and did so ahead of the government’s own plans for Quezon City (which I’ve written about several times in this column). Since the National Capital Plan was forever short of funds to consolidate land, much less put in infrastructure, anyone with a viable alternative was able to meet the demands of the post-war market. Makati offered all this plus it was only four kilometers from the old center compared to 15 from Quezon City.
Sales of housing sites, office and factory plots boomed. The Ayala Avenue strip was soon filled and by the early ‘70s the demand was so great that the last two residential clusters, Legazpi and Salcedo Villages, were turned into commercial zones and opened up for small office buildings. Of course, the drainage and power infrastructure was designed for residences so it took a while to retrofit the utilities. Traffic was also a problem eventually as no one had expected such huge volumes of cars and people. Ayala took another two decades to fix the problem with overhead pedestrian bridges to encourage walking and parking garages to increase capacities. In addition to all these factors was the development of Alabang and alternatives for housing even farther away.
Today, Makati is filling out and density is increasing. The office villages are booming in a second wave that is seeing structures as tall as their Ayala Avenue cousins. The call center phenomenon and new lifestyles are also turning the two into real villages where people actually live-work-play. Ayala Land has started to build high-rise condominiums in, or close to, these villages like the Columns and Columns 2 to bring back the original intent full circle – village life has never been more urban and, from the looks of plans, more urbane.
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