Diana Martinez | A Decolonial Architecture? America’s Gift of “Freedom” to the Philippines

MIT Architecture | Fall 2021 Lecture Series In collaboration with the History, Theory and Criticism Group In August of 1916 the United States Federal Government declared its first formal commitment to grant independence to the Philippines, its first and only (formal) colony. A transitional withdrawal of undefined duration would be monumentalized by a series of provincial capitol buildings intended to represent freedom and independence as a gift from the U.S. to its not yet former colonial subjects. Anticipating the end of World War I, Woodrow Wilson was eager to provide an example of how the United States in the assumption of its role as world leader would shape and support an enthnologically defined “self-determination” as the legal and spiritual basis of national sovereignty. Ralph Harrington Doane, a recent graduate of MIT and the last American Consulting Architect to serve in the Philippines was charged with designing a symbol not of the nation, nor of a former imperial power, but of a tutorial