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An award winning competition entry for a national competition that won first place, the redevelopment of the now decrepit Metropolitan Theater of Manila as a School for Performing Arts and Film is visualized as a high, modern, urban device for the cultivation of high culture in the center of the city metropolis. By turning the MET into a center for performing arts and film education through adaptive re-use, the city of Manila can realize a vision to awaken the Metropolitan theater and ultimately the city center for culture.
The New modern addition is envisioned as an interpretation of a modern architectonic aesthetic to juxtapose its heritage building, the new Met, envisioned as an addition of compositional blocks of architectonic pattern, white and stark against the intricate beauty of Art Deco.
Schools are the institutions of society to create, foster and cultivate knowledge, character and a society’s unique culture. It is the breeding ground for the cultivation of the youth and its people; it is an essential part of the success of a people, a place and an urban fabric. Schools are the prime movers and producers of culture. Thus it is to the ideal design of the re-use of the Manila Metropolitan Theater to re-envision its architecture and place as a school with a program: an outdoor cinema and an open air theatre is built with the architecture of the building, to provide for which the school will integrate an innovative program to its curriculum; show the work of students to the public through the outdoor cinema (film) and the open air theatre (performing arts) as part and parcel of the unique education/program of the school. In this vision, the youth gain empowerment of their ideas, through exposure of work; and the public may gain cultural cultivation and allow a flourishing of culture and arts within the public space of the re-adapted Metropolitan Theater.
The space underneath the LRT line is visualized as a public park in which passer-bys may sit down and watch a showing of film or theater plays by students from the outdoor cinema projector and open air theatre built into the new architecture of the re-adapted building. Within this activity, the otherwise dead unused space of the existing site may come to re-awaken itself in the urban scale.
A conglomeration of culture, to seek the reform of the Manila Metropolitan Theater as an architecture and a place. To give life to a once glorious meeting place of culture through the creating of a contemporary reason and meaning for meeting once again. A conglomeration of culture, the building and place as a space for the people to gather and celebrate culture and the arts and as a creator and maker of meaning.
Exterior with Modern Addition
Open Air Theater
Train Park
Courtyard
Modern Addition Courtyard
Aerial View