How Was Manila Built

Manila has been built three times, and the third time was done in a hurry.

Spanish Intramuros

The walled city was laid out on a grid in 1571 and built in adobe, a soft volcanic tuff quarried nearby, with three kilometres of walls, bastions and a moat. Churches used enormously thick walls and low, buttressed proportions — a style called earthquake baroque, developed after repeated quakes destroyed more conventional buildings. San Agustin, finished in 1607, has survived every earthquake and the war.

The bahay na bato

The characteristic colonial house: a stone ground floor for storage and a timber upper storey projecting over it, with sliding window panels glazed in translucent capiz shell rather than glass, wide eaves and open ventilation. It combines Spanish form with the tropical logic of the indigenous stilt house.

The American plan

Daniel Burnham drew a plan in 1905 with boulevards, a civic centre and a waterfront promenade. Parts were built — the neoclassical government buildings around Rizal Park — before the war ended the project.

After 1945

Rebuilding was ad hoc, in reinforced concrete, with the pre-war fabric mostly gone. Intramuros has been partially reconstructed since the 1980s.

Malls

The shopping mall is the dominant public building type of contemporary Manila, and understanding why matters: air conditioning, security and continuous floor space in a city with severe heat, flooding and few usable pavements. Some are among the largest in the world, and they function as the town square — people meet, eat, worship and exercise in them.

Now

Towers in Makati and Bonifacio Global City on a scale the older city has no answer to.