The Philippine Bureau of Science: “A lost Camelot of research and knowledge”
The Bureau of Science was a monument to the American colonial government’s efforts to systematize and standardize scientific research in the Philippines.
Designed in 1901 by the American architect Edgar K. Bourne in the California Mission style and inaugurated four years later, it once stood near the Philippine General Hospital between Calle Padre Faura and Calle Herran (now Pedro Gil St.).
Despite its colonial trappings, the Bureau of Science was state-of-the-art for its time: it had its own power plant, with facilities capable of delivering vacuum, air pressure, and steam to its research laboratories, as well as electricity from its Westinghouse generators to run lights, refrigerators, and other modern equipment.
Sadly, however, the halcyon days of the Bureau of Science would come to a cataclysmic end in the Second World War.
In the fight to liberate the city, the Bureau and all its contents were razed to the ground and lost forever.
Read more about this lost gem in our Manila Weekly article:
https:/renacimientomanila.org/2021/07/phsciencebureau/
Source: @rebirth.manila
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