In 2008, I wrote the architectural Filipino, the book traces the history of Philippine build forms from its

primeval origins to its contemporary forms. This book inspired the film You're About to see, which
was produced in 2016 with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. In the early 20th
century, American colonialism sought to reshape the Philippines as its neotropical empire,
monumental buildings and new civic spaces were crafted as a civilizing apparatus, neoclassicism, the
city, beautiful movement and Hollywood organized to transform the built environment according to
their image.

With Spain's defeat in the Spanish American War, a new era dawned. A new architecture was to
emerge shaped by American imperial ambition and the logic of manifest destiny.

After pacifying the Filipino rebellion, the American occupation forces turned to rebuild the Philippines,
the Americans sought to reshape Manila's urban environment after an imperial image of a well-
ordered, healthy and beautiful tropical city.

To do this, the military government under General Arthur McArthur placed all public works concerns
under the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The course also undertook the improvements of
the Port of Manila. Soon after, the commission created the Bureau of Engineering and Construction of
Public Works and the Bureau of Architecture and Construction of Public Buildings to oversee the
production of colonial infrastructures.

Through these agencies, the American regime deployed its resources to build public architecture.

It was also within the institutional framework of the DPW that Filipino pioneer architects would
receive their architectural tutelage.

The early years of American occupation was beleaguered by a succession of epidemic diseases and
ordinances were issued to regulate and modify vernacular dwellings.

This brought many technological changes to Filipino domestic space in the name of colonial
sanitation, and the resulting hybrid house was called Charlet. This house was a single story structure
with a front porch constructed of either entirely of wood or a combination of concrete and wood.

To stop the unsanitary practice of bathing and washing in the Astaroth, the authorities established a
new type of communal architecture that combined the functions of toilet baths and laundry supplied
continuously with clean water. The Americans introduced in 1948 the neighborhood concept known
as Sanitary BRIAREOS, which permitted neep the houses to be built on highly regulated blocks of
subdivided lots.

Meanwhile, insular architect Edgar Caban, chief of the Bureau of Architecture, designed setpiece
architecture that mimicked the styles of Spanish colonial buildings. The Spanish mission revival.

The Government Laboratory. Municipal building of Manila.

The insular ice plant and cold storage government printing office and Customs House exhibited the
penchant for pseudo Spanish imagery, one of the priorities of the colonial administrators was
development of a master plan for Manila in the Hill Station in Baguio.

Their aim was to install a sense of cosmopolitan arrangement to Manila's chaotic patchwork of
communities and create an upland health resort in Bargewell.

Daniel Burnham, a prominent American architect, was appointed for the job. Wyndham's corpus of
work earned him a reputation as the father of the city, beautiful movement, carefully designed vistas,
grand civic center. Paxil and Redhill Boulevard's. Classicist formality. And green open spaces and
parkways were hallmarks of the city, beautiful. The master plans aim to reconfigure Manila and
Bargewell as a testimony to American imperial presence and technological modernity. For the
implementation of his Orben directives, Bernheim endorsed William Parsons as consulting architect.
Parsons was responsible for the design of all the public buildings and parks for the entire colony.
Guided by the master plan, neoclassical monumental forms slowly rose in the landscape, working to
enhance the imperial image, colonial commerce and native discipline.

Neoclassical capital buildings, the embodiment of the American Republican ideals, rose in every
provincial or urban center, and it was through this style that the processes of democratic
apprenticeship were made more tangible and modern, reinforced concrete buildings sponsored by the
Colonial State. The normal school. The Philippine General Hospital, the Manila Hotel, and the
provincial capital buildings offered by Pampanga. Elumelu, capice, and Lagoona. Where samples of
his works that embody this esthetic gesture for capital and municipal complexes, Parsons accorded
these structures with a logical and convenient scheme, placing them in a park like setting in a position
of dignity and repose.

Parsons new classic Designs for the Capitals became the archetype for all succeeding capitals built
before and after the war. His contribution to local architecture was the improvement of quality of
construction materials and technique.

After designing the insane hospital in San Lazaro, the first reinforced concrete structure of the
government, he promoted the use of farer concrete as a standard construction material for all
government architecture.

Apart from receiving technical training from the offices of DPW, disserving Filipinos who aspired to be
architects were given a scholarship by the government under the Pentagon's radar system upon
graduation from an American university.

Carlos a burrito. Antonio Toledo.

Thomas Mehbooba.

And one Arrellano where absorbed in the colonial bureaucracy, a high profile civil servants, this batch
of architects, together with the West through the old brass Nakajo Aureliano and Thomas Arguelles,
earned a place in the annals of Philippine architecture as the first generation architects.

Some of them ventured in other styles, such as Art Nouveau. Neil Castillian and a variety of historical
revivalism. By the late 1920s and 1930s, the dominance of.