Philippines: Manila: City Beautiful

In 1904, Secretary of War Taft told W. Cameron Forbes, a member of the Philippine Commission, to secure the services of a city planner.  Forbes went to the top and got Daniel Burnham to come and draw a plan for the place.  Burnham spent maybe six weeks looking around; of equal importance, he then recommended a protege, who stayed on for a decade to implement the Burnham Plan.  The plan is typical of Burnham's work--neoclassical buildings connected by treed boulevards and great swaths of lawn.  More significantly, perhaps, Burnham worked hard to preserve the Spanish colonial city he found.  Rather than replace it, he concentrated his efforts on the south and east margins of Intramuros.  He wrote that the colonial buildings were "especially interesting and in view of their beauty and practical suitability to local conditions could profitably be taken as examples of future structures." It's a very early case of a Western planner respecting the city he's been hired to improve.  Of course, Burnham was really preserving a European city in Asia, which is not so startling as the idea of preserving an Asian city.  Still, it was a pioneering venture. (Burnham's words are quoted from Thomas S. Hines, "American Modernism in the Philippines: The Forgotten Architecture of William E. Parsons," J. of the Soc. of Arch. Historians, December 1973.)