Edifice complex


In the Philippines, the term "edifice complex" was coined in the 1970s to describe Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos' practice of using publicly funded construction projects as political and election propaganda.
Built with a Brutalist architectural style, perhaps to emphasize their grandiose character, these construction projects were funded by foreign loans, allowing the incumbent Marcos administration to create an impression of progress, but instead put the Philippines through a series of debt crises.The first of the crises occurred in 1970, which many economic historians consider to have triggered the socioeconomic unrest which later led Marcos to impose martial law in 1972.

In popular culture

The term was mentioned in the contemporary 1974 disaster film The Towering Inferno in which the developer of the ill-fated skyscraper was maneuvering with a U.S. Senator to secure federal funding for similar buildings around the United States.

Etymology

The term is a play on the "Oedipus complex" of psychoanalytic theory.
While earlier use of the term elsewhere in the world has been suggested, the term was independently coined by Behn Cervantes to criticise the construction of the Cultural Center of the Philippines during the buildup to the 1969 presidential election campaign, during which Imelda Marcos' husband Ferdinand Marcos was running for a then-unprecedented second term as President of the Philippines.

Commonly cited examples

Buildings cited as examples of the Marcos era edifice complex include the buildings of the Cultural Center of the Philippines complex, the San Juanico Bridge, the Philippine International Convention Center, the Philippine Heart Center, the National Arts Center in Los Baños, Laguna, the Coconut Palace, the Lung Center of the Philippines, the National Kidney and Transplant Institute, and Terminal 1 of the Manila International Airport.
The 1976 Tondo evictions which were part of the "Tondo Urban Renewal Project" and the deaths of construction workers at the Manila Film Center are also counted as signs of Imelda's having the complex.
The "designer hospitals" were particularly criticized as wrongly prioritised healthcare projects, draining public funds for the benefit of only a handful of patients, while underfunded basic health institutions, such as the Quezon Institute for Tuberculosis Patients, were overflowing and underfunded.

Destruction of Mt. Sungay

One other example, which was never completed, was the Palace in the Sky complex in Tagaytay, Cavite, which Imelda intended to host the visit of US President Ronald Reagan. The construction of the palace, which was suddenly stopped when Reagan canceled his visit, drastically changed the landscape of the Cavite highland, because preparations for the construction meant levelling the geographically distinct Mount Sungay to about half of its former height.
When the People Power Revolution in 1986 that overthrew the Marcoses, The new government renamed the palace as the People's Park in the Sky, opening it to the public to help demonstrate the excesses of the ousted regime.