Tragic and fabulous

8 07 2012

I discovered on my last day that the University of the Philippines was hosting an exhibition on brutalist architecture under the dictatorship. A shame, I would have been interested to go. But I did have a chance to see some of this architecture in the form of the Cultural Centre of the Philippines. This complex was constructed on reclaimed land under the Marcos regime as one of Imelda’s pet projects, designed as a magnet for glamorous high society in Asia. It never happened. Indeed as I approached, some poor  zombie-like wraith rustled out of a bush in the gardens, complete with missing teeth and bleeding limb, and lurched towards me, screeching “money, money…”

I hurried in.

 

Inside was a different story though. I loved it. Dim, musty and utterly empty it stands in brilliantly outdated style, a beacon of sixties futurism with pleasing tropical touches. Its like Stanley Kubrick meets Southeast Asia. Note not only the serpentine concrete staircases and dripping chandeliers but the benches with their embedded batik cushions.

Other than the fabulous interior, there was an exhibition of Filipino comic book illustrators.

Just down the road, past shady carparks and blazing lawns is the Manila Film Centre, built for Imelda’s non-starter of a Film Festival. The building collapsed in construction drowning  workers in quick-drying cement. The exact number of casualties is disputed, anywhere from a dozen to 170, because the secretive regime was embarrassed by the incident and refused to admit rescue workers. Not surprisingly the building is said to be haunted, leading to the  failure of the now-discontinued festival it was built to house.

The most bizarre part of the whole complex though is the “Coconut Palace ” which was built entirely out of coconut and other local products to house the Pope on his brief visit to Manila in 1981. It supposedly cost  35 million dollars to build. The pope, sniffing an impending publicity disaster, refused to stay there on a visit designed to highlight the indignity of poverty. Imelda, offended, hit back by inviting two other friends of similar stature, Brooke Shields and 80s lothario George Hamilton, to open the Palace as her official guests instead. Take that, pontiff! You got bitchslapped.

As an exercise in kitsch, Brooke Shields standing in as a last-minute replacement for the Pope, with George Hamilton, in a palace built entirely of coconuts, takes some beating.

Today the palace is home to the Vice President!


Actions

Information

2 responses

23 02 2013
Mondomanila | ilbonito blog 2007

[…] (where the directors does much of his casting), garbage-sifting slums, manic-depressive cuisine, decayed elegance, high camp and dire poverty there is a lot of material for Khavn to work […]

9 12 2014
Plutarch Heavensbee

“…some poor zombie-like wraith…”; You disgusting, classist fuck. Oh, nice architecture, by the way!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s




%d bloggers like this: