Bonifacio High Street goes the extra mile
MANILA, Philippines - Just a few years ago, the Fort Bonifacio Development Corporation introduced a fresh new take on the local mall experience: take shopping out of the confines of an enclosed environment and allowed it to breathe. The result was Bonifacio High Street: clusters of both unique and familiar top-of-the-line shopping and dining choices together with business centers presented in one leisurely open stretch, smartly doing away with the often dizzying ins and outs of the ordinary mallscape. In effect, it was like shopping from the street of one’s neighborhood where nothing feels cramped or hurried, and everything is breezy — quite possibly the way shopping should be.
The idea, as if it needs to be stated still, is a success. And for Fort Bonifacio Development Corporation, an idea that works doesn’t need fixing — it needs expanding. Hence, this year, the Bonifacio High Street is going the extra mile. Or to be more exact, adding a whole new stretch to the kilometer-long existing landscape to make way for the new district destined to be Bonifacio Global City’s centerpiece of business and pleasure in a dynamic and vibrant urbanscape.
It is the culminating destination to the High Street experience. And to picture the master plan Bonifacio Global City is set out to do, it looks like a place worth making the stroll for.
A landscape area double the width of that in the existing Bonifacio High Street, an urban amphitheater where the architecture and landscape seamlessly flow out and into each other. A water plaza will serve as a centerpiece, offering a novel array of relaxing and amusing water features, from a play fountain to a fog fountain to just thin sheets of water cascading. Then, as in the existing High Street gardens, there is an ample dose of contemporary art installations created by some of the country’s revered visual artisans. It is a scenery destined to become the next big events venue — what with the series of garden islands creating an intimate and refined space within a setting akin to that of a lush urban botanical garden. It is a landscape created to stir inspiration — and passion.
Enveloping this garden scene are a collection of pavilions, each with a unique design gesture, but collectively complementing each other and the design of its environment. The offices it is set to house, or in the case of this open-space motif, nurture, look like contemporary workspaces, or creative office suites. Mosaic patterns are adapted to create a strong visual identity, its modernity to be enhanced only by glass facades, exciting storefronts, and an even more exciting play of lights, color, scale, space and volume. It is clearly more than an extension to the present Bonifacio High Street setting.
Shopping, of course, remains central in the central’s agenda, since it is geared to be a shopping playground for the fashion forward, and the sartorially experimental. It’s cocktail of establishments include in it a department store, global and avant-garde fashion brands, and other sophisticated offering from fashion to specialty stores. As a necessary adjunct to the breezy shopping experience, a discriminating selection of bistros and cafés, either the first of its kind in the city or unique to the central area of Bonifacio High Street are set to open, each providing a verandah or outdoor seating.
Completing the scenery, if not making it even more an exciting urbanscape, is the fact that not only has the Philippine Stock Exchange chosen the area as the future site for its new building, housing in its structure banks and other financial institutions, the Bonifacio High Street will also be home to a new Shangri-La Hotel structure.
Indeed at the Bonifacio High Street, architecture blends fluidly into the landscape, art beautifully agrees with commerce, and, business converges seamlessly with pleasure. A few years from now, surely, success will expectedly merge with this grand vision.
