When Daniel Burnham arrived in the Philippines in late 1904, the archipelago had only been a colony of the United States for a little more than five years. The reason for Burnham’s visit was simple for someone with his expertise: to develop a City Beautiful urban plan that would represent the American colonial government and its rule.
Burnham was seen as the golden child of American urban planning when he was asked to develop plans for the Filipino cities of Manila and Baguio, the latter intended to be the summer capital of the American colonial government. While his celebrated 1909 Plan of Chicago had yet to be published, his design of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition had brought him great recognition, showcasing the benefits and possibilities of City Beautiful urban planning. As historian Ian Morley explains in his analysis of the selection of Burnham to lead the Philippines projects, “City Beautiful advocates stressed the value of orderly formed urban spaces,” which would aesthetically work well for establishing the control of the new colonial government. Moreover,
the World’s Columbian Exposition illustrated that modern civilization could be distilled into a spatial form manufactured by the trained individual, the architect-planner, and hence all that was necessary to ameliorate society was an opportunity to implement a grand plan within an existing settlement.
It was believed that through Burnham’s architect-planner experience, his designs would be able to establish the authority needed in a looked-down-upon colonial territory.
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The intent of the colonial government wasn’t to hire someone to work with the people of the Philippines to design an urban plan that would work for them, but to hire someone who knew how to design in a way that would reinforce American control over its new colony. In considering Burnham’s view of the Philippines at the time, architectural historian Thomas S. Hines writes that “[l]ike most other ‘progressive’ American imperialists, Burnham and his colleague had had mixed feelings about America in the Philippines,” however, “in part at least, they had subscribed to the challenge flung out by Rudyard Kipling, encouraging Britain’s fledgling Anglo-Saxon offspring to get into the imperial race and uphold its share of uplifting and Anglicizing the world.”
Burnham worked on the plans for Manila and Baguio with architect Pierce Anderson. The pair arrived in the Philippines in December 1904, after a long journey that first saw recreational stops in Hawaiʻi and Japan after their departure from San Francisco. They stayed in the Philippines for six weeks and recorded the needed information to develop their two urban plans. Their final designs for Manila and Baguio were submitted to US Congress in June 1905, several months after their return to the United States.
Geographer Scott Kirsch describes Burnham’s plan, which “featured monumental government buildings and public parks, a revamped street system with radiating arteries extending diagonally across the city, and a new bayfront esplanade of public-private spaces, designed as the new center of public life in the capital.” However, as a much in-demand architect and planner, Burnham wouldn’t be the one to remain in the Philippines to see the project through. That would be American architect William E. Parsons, who was selected by Burnham to implement his vision.
Parsons had the right pedigree for the period. He had earned degrees from both Yale and Columbia, later receiving the McKim Fellowship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Parsons worked to be faithful to the intent of Burnham’s plan, including, Hines writes, following “Burnham’s lead in deferring, whenever possible, to older Spanish and Philippine landmarks. Old forts and plazas in both towns, for example, were to be accentuated and treated as parks and public areas.” This approach does show some consideration for the local architectural history, which was also seen in some of the individual buildings designed by Parsons. For instance, the Gabaldon School Buildings, the designs of which were derived from local building traditions, points to Parsons’s attentiveness to vernacular architecture.
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Parsons remained in the Philippines until he resigned from his position in 1914. In addition to his work interpreting and implementing the Burnham plans, he developed his own City Beautiful plans for the cities of Cebu and Zamboanga.
Burnham’s work in the Philippines may not be his best known or most celebrated, but his City Beautiful plans for both Manila and Baguio give great insight into the roles architecture and urban planning played in the colonial ambitions of the United States during the early twentieth century.
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