Book Description

This research argues that the Art Deco style in the Philippines can be understood both as the imposition of power by the colonizer and the demonstration of resistance of the colonized. The study also proposes that the style can never be neutral, innocent or inert, rather can be embedded within intricacies of ideological practices and political processes. Scholarship on Art Deco architecture outside Europe and the Americas, especially in the Philippines, has remained uncritical as these were often limited to formalistic analysis. Using postcolonial theory, the critical historiography on Philippine Art Deco is to be investigated in terms of three critical categories of mode of production, representation and power. First, mode of production, shows how Art Deco was connected and dependent on the relationship between producers and consumers of the style. The interaction of materials, technologies of construction, patronage, institutions and cultural agents were highlighted in this chapter. Second, representation, explores how Art Deco became the technology of refashioning and re-presenting the different realities. The form, typologies, variants of the architectural style are dissected and problematized according to the politics of representation; Third focuses on power, or the dynamics between the dominated-subjugated and colonizer-colonized. This section established the linkage between the political, economic and social colonial programs and its manifestations in the built form of that period. Furthermore, modes of resistances and empowerment were identified and probed in relation to the power dynamics.