Monumental madness
No, this is not about psychiatric tests. Last week we celebrated Araw ng Kagitingan, formerly known as the “Fall of Bataan” Day. This brought to mind our heroes — soldiers, statesmen, former presidents (at least in the old days) and how we chose to honor them. Aside from giving them a special day of remembrance, we, like may other cultures around the world, have taken to building monuments, some good, but many of questionable design.
Monuments are built on sites of battles, massacres or assassinations. Many more, however, are built as landmarks and focal points in civic and open spaces of towns and cities. This assumes, however, that there are spaces like plazas and parks, large rotundas, or malls (the outdoor, historic kind like those in Washington, DC or London, not the “mega” kind) to accept these monuments and statues.
The practice evolved from Roman city building practices, and over the years in western European cities. Finally, with American cites from which our own cities, like Manila and Cebu, were patterned after. Of course, there were a number of monuments erected in the Spanish period but these were few and far between; besides, we had not embarked on any successful revolutions yet — the fountainhead of heroes (yes, and heroines, but we’ll get to that later).
Manila and most Philippine cities and towns in the American period had master plans that did provide the opportunities for setting suitable for monuments. Aside from the town or city plaza, new modes of transport necessitated the building of large rotundas, which were perfect settings for monuments; also being termini for long avenues or boulevards.
The Rizal monument was set in a civic mall intended to be in the image of the Washington monument in the National Mall in Washington, DC. It stands today as the centerpiece of Rizal Park (our de facto Central Park). The Bonifacio Monument sits in the Monumento circle, a large rotunda meant as the gateway to Manila from the north. The Quezon Memorial is similarly situated but in an immense elliptical space originally meant to house the post-independence congress and senate complex of the Philippines.
From the second half of the 20th century onwards, however, with few exceptions, Metropolitan Manila as well as other Philippine towns and cities (and the authorities and city designers involved) seem to have lost the facility to build memorable monuments.
One of the main reasons for this loss of urban design memory is the fact that the metropolis’ growth is not anymore the product of a grand rational plan, but the outcome of incremental mayhem resulting in the mess we see today. This growth has led the metropolis to lose public open space to road widening, or the pressure to sell these government lands to private developers.
Not helping this situation is the fact that Metro Manila (and most other metro conurbations like Cebu and Davao) are cut up into a multitude of territories and fiefdoms — LGUs, DPWH and consolidated enclaves of private developers — all pulling in varying directions.
Symptomatic of all these issue above is the site, which probably has the highest number of monuments and statues crowded into it — Roxas Boulevard (the old Manila end). I travel down that road often to get to Intramuros or Chinatown. I have been amazed at the number of statues and monuments erected, but all in the sadly improper setting of the roadside.
Many of these statues are raised on small plinths on the landside of Roxas Boulevard but lack any foreground from which to view them. Many, too, have their arms or hands raised and look like they are trying to hail a cab…or are waving to their other statue friends over on the other side of the road along the controversial Baywalk strip.
Starting with the Pasay side I took a ride down the boulevard to see just how many there were. In front of the Legaspi Towers 300 building and opposite the CCP is a statue of General Vicente Lim — war hero and survivor of Bataan. His statue is well crafted but with no space in front as a proper foreground. It is also unexplainably painted in gold, the only one on the strip presented so. Maybe they have a special fund for maintenance. At least the statue has not been painted in “real” colors like many older statues I discovered around the Philippines. The Lim statue can be appreciated only by people in cars as they wait for the traffic light to change.
Next is the statue of Elpidio Quirino, sixth president of the Republic of the Philippines. His statue is well made and has a little space in front but is hidden in the bushes with the Ospital ng Maynila behind as a backdrop. The site is somehow appropriate because the next right turn is to Quirino Avenue, but I would rather have him in a park along his avenue or otherwise a better location would have been in that rotunda that was lost at the intersection of Quirino and Taft Avenue.
Down the stretch we find Ramon Magsaysay, our seventh president who was reportedly killed by the CIA in a plane crash. The Magsaysay statue stands tall in front of his namesake building (reportedly the headquarters of the CIA). Conspiracy theories aside, one still has to look hard to find the statue and I am sure most people don’t know it (and many of the others along the stretch) exists. Maybe Carlos Celdran should do a walking tour, although he’ll have to get insurance for his audience from getting run over by passing cars.
After the Mambo guy we have the first of two tandem statues — the Laurels. Statesman Jose Laurel’s larger-than-life statue was erected first I believe and stands on a robust plinth that looks like the Rizal monument. Not too long ago, he was joined by his son, not more than 10 meters (or two parking slots) away. Unfortunately, former Vice President Doy’s statue is just life-sized, despite both hands upraised literally under the shadow of his father’s larger statue. Talk about art imitating life!
A few blocks away is the statue of President Manuel A. Roxas. Despite the fact that the boulevard is named after him, his statue is the one farthest from the roadway, which is not really bad except for the fact that there is no foreground and Roxas is relegated to being a watch-your-car boy. There is nothing but parked cars in front!
After Roxas is an old open space from the American period, Plaza Ferguson. I did not have time to look but I could not see his statue. The plaza is overgrown with a landscape design that makes no sense, but then what does in this weird city?
Before hitting the Luneta end and just as you turn the corner to United Nations Avenue, one will find Carlos P. Romulo. You have to be quick, or you’ll never seen him since he stands at the very corner, without a foreground, and you cannot stop your car without being rear-ended. The statue is also life-size, which means small despite the fellow’s undeniable stature. The statue is well-made and dramatic, much like one of a similar statesman, Winston Churchill with his cigar. Romulo’s, however, is lost between two pandan clumps and a railing.
I turned the car around past Luneta and the Rizal Monument. I had written about this in this column long ago. There’s good news, however, in that the old Meralco smokestacks that blighted the view of the monument for close to a century have disappeared.
The turn to go back to Roxas Boulevard brought me to the old Legaspi Monument corner and the second tandem of statues. The two Aquinos now stand on high plinths overlooking the corner. I got down to take a closer look. The statues are in the sometimes-painfully distinctive artistic style of Eduardo Castrillo. Some people like his style and some don’t, which is like Virginia Ty-Navarro’s Lady of EDSA situation in terms of aesthetic acceptance (or non-acceptance) by the public. Other sculptors in other countries face the same dilemma It’s not Ed’s fault, really, because the setting is bad (his statues seem to be better configured when he worked with National Artist for Landscape Architecture IP Santos — think Loyola Memorial and the Rizal light and sound vignettes).
The aesthetic issue with the Aquinos’ statues can be focused on the awfully designed setting, ringed by guardrails and set so deep and shallow that the composition cannot be appreciated from any viewpoint. The other, and bigger, problem is the fact that that corner, which apparently is the only piece of land controlled by Manila City Hall, already has two other monuments — the Legaspi monument from the turn of the century and the statue of Dr. Jose Marti behind it.
Without any proper open civic spaces under its jurisdiction (Rizal Park is under the Office of the President), Manila is forced to use one site for several monuments or, worse, a roadside strip (Roxas Boulevard) for opportunities to honor heroes.
Driving back to Roxas, I passed several more roadside monuments on Baywalk, where at least they had space around them for public appreciation. The 1.8-kilometer stretch has Max Soliven, Evelio Javier and Benigno Aquino tandem, Mayor Arsenio Lacson and two vignettes celebrating Filipino OFWs — our modern-day national heroes. All of these sculptures had to be fenced in except for the OFW family’s, which sits on a badly landscaped low platform.
For all these monuments and sculptural settings, obviously no professional urban designers or landscape architects were consulted. The statues themselves are by well-known and acknowledged masters like Imao, Caedo, Mendoza and Castrillo. There must be a better way to honor our heroes. Or maybe we should say that there must be better places to honor them. Otherwise we (and future heroes) will suffer the insult of being literally turned into pedestrians waiting at nondescript curbs to be noticed by passersby.
It is the authorities who make the decisions to place these ill-situated statues on those bad sites that must take psychiatric tests. When will Metro Manila and our other cities be governed sanely? Until then, we have to suffer monumental madness not only in our civic spaces (or lack of them) but in all other aspects of city life — traffic, housing, billboard blight, pollution, and crime. It is criminal the way we are governed at the moment but what do we expect when we elect criminals?
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One of the reasons I also thought of this piece on monumental sculptures is the pending Alay Sining 2 sculpture exhibit and auction by the Rotary Club of Makati West on April 20. As I mentioned, we do have good sculptors and most of them have pieces in the show. They just have to be given the right opportunities and settings for their pieces to really be true to the aim of honoring the heroes or ideas presented. For inquiries, call 753-3474 or e-mail rcmw@gmail.com.
