Manila Metropolitan Theater

Juan M. Arellano had spent a decade producing Beaux-Arts set pieces for the American colonial government when it sent him back to the United States in 1927 to study theatre design under Thomas W. Lamb. He returned a different architect. The Metropolitan Theater, inaugurated on 10 December 1931, is where Art Deco arrives in the Philippines, and it arrives localised: banana and bird-of-paradise foliage cast into the concrete, a stepped frontispiece, coloured glass and relief sculpture by Francesco Riccardo Monti and Isabelo Tampinco. The Battle of Manila in 1945 wrecked it, and the seventy years that followed brought a run of restorations of varying seriousness and long stretches of abandonment. The building was declared a National Historical Landmark in 1976 and a National Cultural Treasure in 2010, and reopened on 10 December 2021, ninety years to the day after its first night.