Location: Pasay City, Philippines.

Architect: WTA Architecture and Design Studio.

The Manila Film Center, built during the Marcos regime, was designed to showcase the city’s grandeur and national collectivity. However, its brutalist architecture and intimidating landscape have made it an uninviting and desolate space. Several attempts to revive the building have failed to address the central problem of its landscape. The proposed solution is to convert the space into the Manila Creative Hub, which aims to reconnect the building to the public both physically and metaphorically. The design proposal includes lessening the massive base and hardscapes to open up the building to inviting spaces, replacing the staircase with public commercial spaces, and updating the crown of the edifice with pixelations derived from the geographic outlines of the Philippines. The creative park aims to wash away the memory of martial law and the abandoned site, replacing it with a place of celebration of culture and arts. The programmatic functions of the edifice are reimagined to be of an open museum, lifestyle parks, and creative offices. The proposed design creates a strong relationship between the street and the building, reviving it as a creative hub that returns the space to the Filipino people.