Introduction

In November 1935, Captain Ed Musick of Pan American Airways piloted the China Clipper out of San Francisco Bay, the first commercial trans-Pacific mail flight to Manila. A photograph taken upon the seaplane’s arrival captures it touching down in Manila Bay, with the Manila Hotel and the expanse of Rizal Park’s gardens visible along the shoreline (Figure 1). Known as the birthplace of Philippine nationalism, Rizal Park, also known as Luneta, was the place where national hero José Rizal was executed in 1896 and where Manuel Quezon was inaugurated as the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth, just weeks before the Clipper’s arrival. The image distills the optimism of a moment when the United States and the Philippines appeared to be entering a new geopolitical relationship of mutual ambitions in technology and commerce, following a period of colonial war and contested sovereignty. That optimism had a specific material context. In the United States, the Depression had catalyzed federal investment in housing, infrastructure, and consumption. New Deal spending was expanding the American middle class, and new technologies in aviation and shipping were bringing Pacific markets within reach of West Coast cities. In the Philippines, Quezon — a champion of social justice with close ties to American institutions, most notably to General Douglas MacArthur — seemed to promise both independence and modernization. The China Clipper both physically and ideologically connected these two worlds. This article examines two buildings that gave architectural form to that moment. The Pan-Pacific Auditorium (Los Angeles, 1935) and the Jai Alai Auditorium (Manila, 1940) were both designed by the Los Angeles firm Wurdeman & Becket, commissioned within five years of one another, and linked by a direct line of patronage: Quezon visited the Pan-Pacific Auditorium during a US diplomatic tour in 1939 and subsequently commissioned Welton Becket to design a comparable entertainment venue for Manila’s civic center. Together, the buildings bookend the Commonwealth period and illuminate how a single firm’s practice extended from domestic federal commissions to overseas imperial patronage.

Figure 1: Photograph of the China Clipper, the first flight from San Francisco, landing in Manila Bay, commissioned by Pan American World Airways, Inc., 1935. Pan American World Airways, Inc. records, Box 1 Folder 251–2, Special Collections, University of Miami Library.

Scholarship on the built environment of the US-Philippine relationship has focused predominantly on two periods: the early colonial moment of Burnham-era civic planning and neoclassical institutional architecture, and the post-WWII reconstruction era. Thomas Hines (2008), Ian Morley (2016), and Wolfgang Sonne (2004) have documented how Daniel Burnham’s 1905 Manila Plan used monumental civic architecture to impose a US nationalist vision of progress upon Filipino subjects. Warwick Anderson’s (2006) work on colonial medicine extends this to sanitary campaigns and slum clearance as biopolitical interventions in the built environment. Diana Martinez (2024) demonstrates how Juan Arellano’s 1926 Legislative Building materialized the racial ordering of liberal internationalism through Beaux-Arts form. Gerard Lico (2008) has comprehensively traced the political work of Neoclassical government buildings. This body of work establishes the dominant framework of Early Modernism in the Philippines as one organized around civic order, monumental governance, and the visible assertion of US institutional authority. In the postwar decades, Filipino architects mobilized modernism as a deliberate break from colonial aesthetics, reorienting practice toward nation-building through functionalist and tropically adapted design. Figures such as Cesar Concio and Pablo Antonio brought Bauhaus and brutalist vocabularies into dialogue with climate-responsive principles, producing an architecture of independent statehood (Lico 2008; Ogura, Yap, and Tanoue 2002). The intervening decade, from 1933 to 1945, which was bounded by the inauguration of the Philippine Commonwealth and the end of WWII, has received comparatively little architectural attention, despite representing a fundamental reorientation of both the built environment and the geopolitical relationship it expressed. While Art Deco of the 1930s has received some attention as a marker of emerging Filipino nationalist modernism (Lico and Dy 2020), the specifically commercial and entertainment architecture of the Commonwealth period, and its transnational circuits of production, remains underexamined. Federal investment, expanding consumer culture, and new transportation and communication technologies created conditions for an architectural practice oriented toward spectacle, entertainment, and commercial exchange. This shift was forged across the Pacific, as architects, capital, and design templates circulated between the US and its overseas territories as geopolitical relationships were being restructured. This article traces that circulation through Wurdeman & Becket’s movement from Los Angeles to Manila, arguing that the firm’s practice exemplifies how architectural professionalization and imperial networks became mutually constitutive during this period.

Streamline Moderne — characterized by aerodynamic massing, horizontal banding, curved corners, and surfaces that evoked the velocity of ocean liners, aircraft, and automobiles — was the aesthetic language of this moment. Beyond mere stylistic register, it was an architectural order organized around consumption, spectacle, and the performance of modernity. Where the Neoclassical buildings housing early US administration asserted institutional authority through permanence and monumentality, Streamline Moderne buildings asserted power through attraction, entertainment, and capital circulation. When transplanted to Manila and layered onto existing colonial architectures and an emerging Filipino nationalist modernism, Streamline Moderne became a site where US commercial ambition, Commonwealth aspirations, and cosmopolitan fantasy were simultaneously expressed and entangled. The result was an architecture less about governance than about desire, another form of imperial relation. By tracing how a single firm’s practice circulated between Los Angeles and Manila, this article argues that Streamline Moderne aesthetics functioned as both reflection and producer of the economic opportunism, military ambition, and commercial exchange that bound the continental United States to its Pacific and Caribbean territories. The article proceeds in four parts. The first situates Wurdeman & Becket within the geopolitical moment, examining how the ideological infrastructure of Pan-Pacific rhetoric, the flow of materials and capital, and the expansion of professional networks across the Pacific positioned certain firms to operate at both domestic and imperial scales. The second examines the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, moving from the building’s design and Streamline Moderne vocabulary to the convergent interests of federal housing policy, commercial promotion, and Pan-Pacific exhibition culture that shaped its commission and programming. The third turns to the Jai Alai Auditorium, tracing Becket’s path from Quezon City planning to Manila’s civic center and examining how the building’s placement, program, formal aesthetics, and financial arrangements facilitated the mechanisms of Commonwealth governance. The fourth considers how these two buildings were representative of broader imperial networks, situating Becket’s postwar practice and the parallel trajectories of other American firms within the longer arc of US architectural presence across the Pacific.

Wurdeman & Becket and the Imperial Moment

Walter Wurdeman and Welton Becket first met in the architecture program at the University of Washington in Seattle and were reunited by chance in Santa Monica in the early 1930s, both restless in their current positions. Wurdeman had worked as a riveter at the Puget Sound Navy Yard before completing a master’s degree at MIT, where his drawings caught the attention of Los Angeles architect Charles Plummer. Becket had turned down a contract with the Green Bay Packers to pursue architecture, completing his degree in Seattle before a postgraduate year at the École des Beaux-Arts in Fontainebleau. Together they negotiated a partnership with Plummer, who was aging out of his established practice of institutional, educational, and residential work across the city. The firm of Plummer, Wurdeman and Becket survived the post-Depression economy on small commercial projects and alterations before winning the competition to design the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in 1935 (Emerton 2022; Hunt 1972). The commission emerged from decades of accumulated ideological and commercial infrastructure: the trade networks, civic boosterism, and Pan-Pacific exhibition culture that had positioned Los Angeles as the self-proclaimed gateway to Pacific markets since the turn of the century. President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1903 acquisition of Panamanian land rights and the subsequent completion of the Panama Canal secured American access to Atlantic trade routes and established a sustained military and commercial presence across the Pacific. The Pan-Pacific Union, founded in 1912 to ‘unite the races and countries in and about the Pacific’, projected American governance across its newly acquired island territories as benevolent coordination (Pan-Pacific Union 1919). This vision was sustained through overlapping networks of commerce, education, and media. The first Pan-Pacific Press Congress, held in Honolulu in 1921, framed the Pacific as a shared regional project with American leadership at its center; the first Pan-Pacific Conference on Education, Rehabilitation, Reclamation and Recreation followed in 1927, opening with greetings from the US president and the secretary of the interior (Pan-Pacific Union 1921). Together these networks built consensus for American intervention in Pacific territories under the guise of modernization and regional development, creating the ideological framework within which architectural projects like the Pan-Pacific Auditorium would be understood as symbols of progress rather than instruments of empire.

The conditions enabling Wurdeman and Becket’s ambitions were material as much as ideological. Philippine timber, sugar, and coconut oil had been flowing into American markets since the early 20th century: the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair advertised the Philippines’ fifty million acres of virgin timber as available for American extraction (Patajo-Legasto 2008; Burns 2013), while sugar and coconut oil moved duty-free to American manufacturers throughout the colonial period (Pante 2017: 91). Ocean liner routes connecting Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Honolulu to Manila established the commercial circuits that underwrote West Coast expansion (Zimmerman 2008). New Deal investment amplified these flows, channeling federal dollars into housing, infrastructure, and consumer goods at the same moment that Pan American Airways was opening the Pacific to passenger travel. The China Clipper’s 1935 inaugural flight was the culmination of a decade of investment in the transportation infrastructure connecting American cities to their overseas territories (Periscope Film LLC 1940). For architects with the right connections, this was a moment of unusual opportunity. A 1930 New York Times survey of ‘America’s Far-Flung Empire’ captured the tensions of the arrangement, cataloging 911,000 square miles of overseas territory while acknowledging persistent agrarian unrest, anti-imperial resistance, and the challenge of maintaining extraction from territories that had demanded independence from the outset of American administration (Norton 1930). The dilemma, as the article made clear, was how to sustain economic presence without the administrative apparatus of military occupation. The Commonwealth period, framed as a transition to Philippine self-governance, offered to restructure imperial arrangements by replacing military occupation with financial supervision, trade agreements, and cultural dependency (Pante 2017; Martinez 2024). Navigating these arrangements required professionals who could move between federal agencies, corporate clients, and overseas governments to translate American development priorities into built form.

Streamline Moderne was well suited to represent this transition. Unlike earlier Panama Pacific exposition buildings designed in Spanish Colonial Revival, the structures of post-1933 world fairs adopted what promoters described as distinctively American Streamline Moderne architecture (Fojas 2005). Architectural historians have since situated Streamline Moderne within the broader international trajectory of Art Deco while distinguishing its particular American inflection: forms and surfaces that communicated speed and technological optimism rather than ornament (Meikle 2001). The style spread beyond the US through commercial and colonial networks, appearing in British imperial contexts, Latin America, and across the Pacific, though scholarship has primarily treated it within national frameworks (Pells 2011). Where European modernisms of the same period announced themselves through ideological explicitness, whether the functionalism of the Bauhaus (Pevsner 2005 [1936]) or the monumental classicism of fascist state architecture (Etlin 1991), American Streamline Moderne operated through consumer desire, aestheticizing modernity rather than legislating it. In departing from Neoclassical and Colonial Revival precedents, the style staked a claim to a new US nationalist architecture whose aerodynamic curves referenced the ocean liners and cargo ships connecting US ports to Pacific territories, and the cruise ships developing a tourism industry between Los Angeles, Honolulu, Manila, and other island destinations (Zimmerman 2008). Where earlier colonial architectures had announced imperial authority through visual vocabularies legible to Filipino subjects as European governance, this distinction created ideological space for Filipino elites to position themselves as participants in, rather than subjects of, a shared Pacific modernity. It was precisely the aesthetic register that economic imperialism required and would carry Wurdeman and Becket’s practice from Los Angeles to Manila.

The Pan-Pacific Auditorium

The Pan-Pacific Auditorium was the product of an unlikely convergence of a federal housing initiative, a Los Angeles real estate syndicate, and one promoter’s ambition to bring a world’s fair to the West Coast. In 1935, the Federal Housing Administration approached the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to develop the first National Housing Exposition, intending to publicize the loan programs of the newly formed National Housing Authority (Goodwin 2017). The Chamber contacted Cliff Henderson, who had gained national attention promoting the Air Races at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Henderson interpreted the invitation as a larger opportunity, using the Chamber’s offer as leverage to pursue his ambitions to establish a permanent Pan-Pacific International Exposition venue for Los Angeles. Together with his brother Phillip and a syndicate of oil and automobile industry investors, he formed a company to finance the proposal. The Chamber agreed to support the development of a semi-permanent structure on a twelve-and-a-half-acre site between Fairfax and Beverly Boulevards, near the La Brea Tar Pits. The site was leased from Clifford Gilmore, an oil magnate who had transitioned from extraction to development and entertainment, most visibly through the construction of Gilmore Stadium on the adjacent property. A competition was held for the design of what Henderson called the ‘Pan-Pacific Auditorium’, a name invoking the commercial rhetoric of Pan-Pacific unity while positioning Los Angeles as the gateway to Pacific trade (Goodwin 2017; National Housing Exposition Scrapbook).

Plummer, Wurdeman and Becket’s Streamline Moderne submission was selected as the winner among the competition entries (Figures 2, 3). At just $5,000 in architectural fees, the commission was modest, but for a young firm with cosmopolitan ambitions it represented exactly the kind of high-profile, nationally visible project worth speculating on. Through analysis of archival drawings and photographs preserved at the Getty Research Institute, it is apparent that their design was shrewdly conceived for the constraints: a wood-framed, stucco-finished, 400 x 250-foot utilitarian shed that could be completed in six weeks for one dollar per square foot, yet whose Streamline Moderne entrance concentrated all spectacle and visual ambition at the facade. The building became one of the three largest auditoriums in the United States at the time of its construction (Charleton 1978), its scale made possible by a long-span structural system that eliminated interior columns, allowing large-scale technologies and products to be displayed and circulated without obstruction. Economy and showmanship were, by design, the same move. A seemingly simple geometric grid in plan was configured to maximize efficiency, its long-span structural system opening the central hall into an uninterrupted exhibition floor. At the center of the plan, a circle, suggestive of a fountain or gathering place, marked the focal point of the space and the heart of the spectacle within. All formal ambition, however, was concentrated at the entrance facade. Four tall vertical fins rose from a projecting disk canopy, their stacked forms recalling the steam vents of an ocean liner, each pierced by a tall flagpole extending into the sky above. The disk canopy itself was detailed to a knife edge at its outermost extent, appearing thin and aerodynamic, as if optimized for moving through air or water. Chamfered corners on the flanking walls adjacent to the entrance drew visitors inward, as if channeling their movement like water into the belly of a vessel. Contrasting colors between the sea-green tinted main facade and lighter horizontal banding reinforced the building’s lateral emphasis, tracing the eye across the facade and amplifying the streamlined effect. Chrome piping details and strip windows recalled the layered decks and railings of luxury liners connecting Los Angeles to Pacific ports.

Figure 2: Entrance to the Pan Pacific Auditorium, 1942. Julius Shuman photography archive, Series IV, The Getty Research Institute.

Figure 3: Schematic plan of the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, demonstrating the long-span structural strategy allowing for uninterrupted viewing of large exhibition displays in the center bay. Welton Becket architectural drawings and photographs, Series III, The Getty Research Institute.

The Pan-Pacific Auditorium’s inaugural event, called the ‘World’s Fair of American Homes’, attracted over 10,000 attendees. Henderson described its purpose as ‘not as a dazzling entertainment spectacle, but rather as a delightful, constructive and artistic portrayal of a more gracious mode of living’ (National Housing Exposition Scrapbook). The exposition housed 160 exhibits inside the auditorium, including an FHA booth where visitors could apply for construction loans on the spot. Five model homes were constructed on the grounds outside, including a full-scale California ranch-style home sponsored by the Los Angeles Times, raffled off to one lucky attendee (Goodwin 2017). A pageant titled ‘Housing Through the Ages’ highlighted the exhibition’s logic. Where earlier world fairs had staged degrees of civilization through the display of racialized bodies, this one staged them through housing stock. Antiquated housing stood as the spectacle of backwardness in comparison to standardized, financialized, and racially coded, single-family model homes against which American progress could be measured. The building’s subsequent programming made explicit the convergence of domestic federal policy and Pan-Pacific commercial promotion that Henderson had envisioned from the outset. Over 90,000 people attended the National Pacific Aircraft and Boat Show in the months following the housing exposition (Lyman 1936). The Douglas Sleeper plane was highlighted for its scale and comfort as a trans-Pacific airliner, while the Northrop Company featured a fighter plane built for export to China (Lyman 1936; Thomis 1936). The same technologies of speed and transportation visualized in the building’s ocean liner aesthetics were also the infrastructure of American commercial and military power across the Pacific. In 1936, the Pan-Pacific Auditorium received the AIA Honor Award, cementing the building and the architecture firm’s national acclaim (Goodwin 2017). Henderson managed the auditorium through 1947, establishing it as the region’s premier venue for auto shows, concerts, boat shows, hockey, basketball, and ice shows. It was during one such event that the building’s influence extended across the Pacific. After visiting the Pan-Pacific Auditorium during his United States diplomacy tour in 1939, Philippine Commonwealth president Manuel Quezon commissioned Welton Becket to design a comparable entertainment venue for Manila (Hunt 1972: 10–11).

Becket, Quezon City, and the Jai Alai Auditorium

When Manuel Quezon commissioned Welton Becket to design the Jai Alai Auditorium in 1940, it was not their first collaboration. Becket had arrived in the Philippines two years earlier as part of a planning team assembled to design Quezon City, a new capital intended to project Commonwealth modernity while addressing the social pressures of a rapidly urbanizing nation. Quezon had come to power in 1935 on a platform of social justice, declaring in his inaugural address that the Philippines would build not from the ashes of the past but from the ‘standing materials of the living present’ (Quezon 1935). To realize the new capital city, Quezon assembled a team with collective experience in American modern design: Harry Frost, architecture advisor to the Commonwealth and former consultant to the Chicago Plan Commission; AD Williams, former director of the Bureau of Public Works; Arellano; and Becket (Fox 1941; Pante 2017, 91). The team produced a masterplan organized around wide streets emanating from a central Civic Quadrangle, modeled on Washington, DC, and the planning frameworks that Frost and others had developed for American cities (PCD SPO 2016). In this earlier role, Becket was operating within a more familiar mode of American architectural export that had governed American intervention in the Philippines since Burnham’s 1905 Manila Plan. Yet Quezon City would reveal the limits of that tradition’s progressive rhetoric. The Commonwealth’s housing ambitions consistently fell short of their stated social aims, producing outcomes that served middle-class consolidation over working-class need (Pante 2017: 100–102). Those contradictions were most visible in the housing program for Quezon City. Arellano designed the first of four planned sanitary barrios, completed in 1940, with 439 units on lots of 100 square meters, to be paid in installments of eight pesos per month. With the minimum wage set at one peso per day, the units proved inaccessible to the working class they nominally served (Lacuesta 2017). Middle-class Filipinos moved in instead, successfully lobbying to rename the neighborhood after a local native tree, further distancing it from its working-class intentions. The gap between Quezon’s social justice rhetoric and the exclusionary outcomes of his housing program was a pattern Becket had now seen operate on both sides of the Pacific.

While Quezon City absorbed much of the Commonwealth’s initial planning energy, Manila, which remained the capital city until 1948, was becoming overcrowded, with increasingly unsanitary conditions and economic disparity. In a 1939 address before the National Assembly, Quezon articulated his vision for a capital that would be, politically, the seat of national government; aesthetically, the showplace of the nation; socially, a dignified concentration of human life and aspiration; and economically, a productive and self-contained community (PCD SPO 2016). Rather than addressing these conditions equally, Quezon focused investment in the civic center toward spectacle and national projection. The Jai Alai Auditorium, commissioned the following year, was the most visible expression of that vision. The site allocated for the new sporting venue framed the civic plaza that was at the heart of Burnham and Anderson’s Report on Proposed Improvements at Manila (1905), adopted as the framework for Manila’s colonial-era development upon approval by US Congress in 1906. In the decades that followed, parts of Burnham’s Plan of Manila — as it came to be known — were realized, including the central civic core and waterfront esplanade, the enlargement of Rizal Park, and the construction of the Legislative Building, Metropolitan Theater, and Central Post Office (Figure 4). Yet only a fraction of his Neoclassical vision was completed, with investment shifting toward Quezon’s new capital (Hines 2008; Morley 2016). In its place Quezon installed a streamlined gambling palace to house Jai Alai, a sport of Spanish Basque origin that had migrated to the Philippines under Spanish colonial rule. Gaining an international commercial audience after betting was legalized in Florida in 1934, elite establishments in Miami, Mexico City, and Havana drew crowds to witness what promoters described as the fastest and most dangerous sport in the world (Morton 2019; Olsen 1965). Without betting, promoters argued, the sport’s cultural significance was irrelevant outside the Basque region (Morton 2019). Gambling transformed it from cultural practice into revenue-generating entertainment. By siting a Jai Alai auditorium within Manila’s civic core, Quezon demonstrated that Commonwealth governance operated through a different logic than Burnham’s colonial administration, one in which authority was performed not through monumental permanence but through the managed pleasures of speed, risk, and cosmopolitan spectacle. The architecture made this legible: Becket’s glazed and glowing streamlined facades faced outward toward a paying public, signaling participation in an international leisure culture that bound Manila to Miami, Havana, and Los Angeles. This was a coloniality of desire rather than decree, one in which Filipino elites and their American partners co-produced a built environment that naturalized US commercial networks as the infrastructure of modernity itself.

Figure 4: Location of the Jai Alai Auditorium highlighted alongside points of interest in the civic center of Burnham’s Plan of Manila (Burnham and Anderson, 1905). Buildings completed by 1940 — including the National Congress building, Metropolitan Theater, and Central Post Office — are marked on the original plan; the full Neoclassical program was only partially realized.

Joining Becket in the project was Arellano, whose career embodied the entangled professional history of the colonial and Commonwealth periods. Having traveled to the United States at age eighteen to work at the Jamestown Exhibition, Arellano was subsequently sponsored by an American family for architectural training at the Philadelphia Academy, where he received a Beaux-Arts education (‘Noted Architect’ 1927). After touring Europe, he returned to the Philippines and rose through the Bureau of Public Works, producing a portfolio that ranged from the Neoclassical Manila Post Office to the Art Deco Metropolitan Theater (Immerwahr 2021; Martinez 2025). His own trajectory traced the aesthetic shift the city was undergoing, from colonial monumentalism toward the commercial modernism already visible on Escolta, Manila’s premier commercial street. There, Filipino architects had developed an Art Deco streetscape throughout the 1930s, including Andres Luna’s Crystal Arcade (1932) and Pablo Antonio’s Bel-Air Alhambra Apartments (1937) (Lico and Dy 2020). The Escolta streetscape foregrounded a stylistic trajectory in both US and Filipino architecture from the 1930s to the 1940s. Art Deco’s geometric paring back of Art Nouveau ornament had taken hold among Filipino architects by the early 1930s, both absorbed from American influence and adapted and evolved domestically to the tropical environment with jalousie shutters, large balconies and ample ventilation. In the United States and its overseas territories, this trajectory had by the late 1930s given way to Streamline Moderne, driven by the same post-Depression conditions of federal investment, expanding consumer culture, and a public appetite for the spectacle of speed, travel, and modernity. The horizontal banding and curved corners of Art Deco were carried into Streamline Moderne but stripped of decorative elaboration and inflected with the formal language of ocean liners and aircraft. Becket’s commission brought Streamline Moderne to Manila in its fullest expression. With Arellano as its most authoritative local interpreter, that vocabulary was now transferred from American entertainment culture to the heart of Burnham’s colonial plan.

The Jai Alai building in Manila substantially expanded the scale and program of the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles, while elaborating its Streamline Moderne vocabulary vertically and volumetrically across its full height (Figure 5). Where Becket’s Los Angeles building had concentrated its formal ambition on a projecting entrance canopy and four ornamental spires, the Manila building extended that language across multiple occupiable stories. Four tall, thin, cylindrical columns stood in front of the entrance facade, supporting a horizontal projecting canopy above the first floor and extending up to a circular disk cap at the top of the roof, with four flag poles rising above. A vertical multi-story cylindrical glass facade rose behind the columns and canopies, glowing from the interior and housing the double-height entrance foyer. Crowning the entrance facade, a gilded relief depicting players of the sport announced the building’s program before visitors crossed the threshold. Inside the foyer, mirror-plated undulating columnar forms created fluid reflections as visitors circulated through the space, surfaces moving like water within the cylindrical enclosure (Figure 6). The fronton, annotated as ‘playground’ in Becket’s plans in the Getty archive, was organized around the structural logic of long-span construction. Intricate lighting rigs over the playing court and raked audience seating on the opposite side were separated by a triple-story wire net. The uninterrupted span overhead allowed for clear sightlines across the full width and height of the space, from the three levels of audience seating to the three-sided playing court. The sport required exceptionally durable construction. Granite blocks twelve inches thick, quarried in China, formed the court walls, capable of withstanding the 120-mile-per-hour speeds at which pelota balls strike (‘Jai Alai Sports Center’ 1945: 74). The material flow from China to the Philippines for an American-designed building was one expression of the transpacific networks undergirding Commonwealth development.

Figure 5: Exterior view of the main entrance to the Jai Alai Auditorium in Manila, 1942. Carl Mydans, photographer. LIFE Photo Archives.

Figure 6: The Jai Alai Sports Center in Manila, as published in the Architectural Record article of February 1945: floor plans and interior photographs highlighting areas for audience services — foyer, bars, betting counters, galleries, viewing (‘Jai Alai Sports Center’ 1945: 75–76).

While the court required sophisticated structural and material engineering, most of the building’s floor area, program, and aesthetic treatment were devoted to spaces of consumption. The private dining foyer, complete with its own kitchen, chef, wine room, and waiter’s station, along with a ballroom and air-conditioned Sky Room bar on the uppermost floor, became the region’s prime location for elite entertainment. Undulating built-in banquets, circular bars, scrim partitions, and silver-plated columnar forms were mirrored by reflective ceiling panels and backlit soffits above. Glowing above Manila’s civic center after dark, the penthouse bar advertised modern luxury and sophisticated leisure to the city below. Where Burnham’s monumental government buildings had projected authority through scale and classical form visible by day, the Jai Alai building projected commercial modernity through light and spectacle visible by night. The economic arrangements governing the building made the extraction mechanism explicit. Under Commonwealth Acts 485 and 601, the land and building would not become property of the Philippine government until 25 years after completion, extending American financial control well beyond the 10-year Commonwealth transition period that was supposed to culminate in independence in 1946. The US Treasury would receive 10.5 percent of all bets placed at the venue, plus a 20 percent amusement tax on sporting events, and an additional rental property tax on separate programs housed within the building (PCD SPO 2016). Where Burnham’s government buildings had represented American power through monumental scale and classical references to Western civilization, the Jai Alai building represented American power through its capacity to generate revenue while appearing to serve Filipino interests. The building’s streamlined modernity was, in this sense, structurally honest: its forms announced circulation, speed, and commercial exchange, and for 25 years its legal arrangements delivered exactly that, to American coffers.

The building’s wartime history and postwar conversion reveal a further transition in the mechanisms of American control. The Jai Alai Auditorium survived both Japanese and American bombings during the Battle of Manila and served as an air raid shelter for both occupying armies, contributing to a public perception of the structure as a symbol of Philippine resilience. The Architectural Record, in a postwar retrospective, celebrated the building as having been constructed before the Japanese occupation, framing it as representing freedom and democracy (‘Jai Alai Sports Center’ 1945: 74). After the war, the US Army contributed toward the $500,000 reconstruction costs, converting the building into a Red Cross service center renamed the Roosevelt Club, with the fronton repurposed as a dance floor and theater, serving 40,000 military personnel daily (Lougopal 2012). The building that had extracted revenue through Filipino gambling now served American military recreation. Just two years after the building’s conversion, in March 1947, the United States and the Philippines signed the Military Bases Agreement, granting the US 99-year leases on 22 military sites across the archipelago, including Subic Bay Naval Base — a site to which Becket himself would return for design additions in 1956. Juliet Nebolon’s concept of settler militarism helps illuminate what this sequence reveals. In her analysis of wartime Hawai’i, Nebolon demonstrates how settler colonialism and militarization operated together across the Pacific, each perpetuating and legitimating the other in the service of empire building (Nebolon 2024). What the Jai Alai building’s trajectory makes visible is how that dynamic had been prepared long before the military arrived. The legal frameworks, financial extraction mechanisms, and American institutional presence established during the Commonwealth period had already normalized the conditions of occupation, refracted through the idiom of leisure and modernity. The building’s conversion from gambling palace to military recreation center to a territorial arrangement secured by treaty was not a rupture but a continuation. That Becket’s own hand guided both phases suggests that the transition from commercial empire to military empire was less a transformation than a renovation.

Imperial Networks and the Longer Arc

The careers of Wurdeman and Becket after 1941 reveal the Pan-Pacific Auditorium and Jai Alai Auditorium not as exceptional commissions but as the opening moves in a sustained architectural practice taking advantage of an imperial arrangement. When Becket returned to Los Angeles in January 1941, the Los Angeles Times announced his homecoming from an ‘Orient Journey’ in ‘Pacific Lands’, noting his completion of the Jai Alai stadium and the designing of several clubs and a government housing project during his 18-month stay (Fox 1941). The skills Becket brought back were immediately applicable. By 1941, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles had commissioned a consortium, which included Wurdeman and Becket alongside Richard Neutra, Paul Williams, Gordon Kauffman, and Adrian Wilson, to design public housing for wartime defense workers in South Los Angeles. The two projects they produced drew directly on the planning frameworks and government housing experience Becket had developed in Quezon City. The transfer of professional knowledge across the Pacific became the mechanism through which imperial networks reproduced themselves in domestic space. The two buildings at the center of this article spoke the same visual language, borrowed from the ocean liners and cargo ships that moved goods and capital across the Pacific. As Deborah Silverman (2011) has demonstrated in her analysis of Henry van de Velde’s steamer style architecture, ocean liner aesthetics in architecture represented the global commercial networks that maritime technology enabled. In the context of Pan-Pacific imperialism, these forms signified the technologies of transportation and communication that facilitated the movement of resources, goods, and people between shores. These were the same networks that Streamline Moderne had visualized since the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. The shift from governance to commerce, from civic monumentality to leisure infrastructure, was the architectural dimension of the transition from military colonialism to economic imperialism.

The same years that saw Becket working in Manila produced parallel practices across multiple American firms. Richard Neutra, who joined Becket in the Los Angeles public housing consortium in 1941, served on Puerto Rico’s Committee on Design of Public Works from 1943 to 1945, designing over 150 schools and nearly 130 rural health centers. In this role, Neutra worked under Governor Rexford Tugwell, formerly Roosevelt’s New Deal advisor, who had established planning boards enlisting modernist architects to develop Commonwealth infrastructure in San Juan (Moreen 2013). Skidmore, Owings and Merrill extended their practice from New York ‘slum clearance’ projects to US Air Force family housing at Clark Air Base in the Philippines in the 1960s and a masterplan for San Juan commissioned by Puerto Rico’s Urban Renewal and Housing Corporation (Hartman 2022; Burchardt & Leinius 2022). Town Planning Associates, led by Josep Lluís Sert, developed the Havana Plan Piloto between 1955 and 1958 before moving to serve on the Architectural Advisory Committee for the Boston Redevelopment Authority (Hyde 2013). In each case, the same professionals, design templates, and administrative frameworks circulated between domestic urban renewal and overseas territorial development. The Commonwealth period was a proving ground for professional models that would define American architectural practice through the Cold War. After Wurdeman’s death in 1949, Becket reorganized the firm as Welton Becket and Associates and pursued a decidedly global portfolio. The firm designed the Beverly Hilton (1952–1957), followed by Hilton Hotels in Cairo (1953–1955), Havana (1953–1957), Baghdad (1957–1958), and Beirut (1958) — buildings Annabel Jane Wharton describes as ‘little Americas’ intended to project the consumer comforts of American modernity to countries most exposed to Cold War competition (Wharton 2001: 35). The firm also designed institutional and entertainment buildings for the Pan-American World Airways (1952), the US Air Force (1953), the Philippines Subic Naval Base (1956), and the Atomic Energy Commission in Tokyo (1958), along with the Hawaiian Village in Waikiki (1956) and an Inter-Continental Hotel in Cambodia (1967). The Pan-Pacific rhetoric of the 1935 auditorium had by now become a literal description of the firm’s geographic reach. In the Cold War decades, embassies, hotels, and corporate modernism became the architectural infrastructure of US global hegemony, what scholars have termed an architecture of Pax Americana (Loeffler 1998; Wharton 2001; Cody 2003).

The Havana Hilton, designed between 1953 and 1957 for President Fulgencio Batista’s government, demonstrated a clear continuity with Becket’s Commonwealth-era work. Built on the same program as the Beverly Hilton, the building replicated its predecessor’s architectural strategies. Both hotels featured circular entrance ramps leading to basement parking garages, extravagant cantilevers, interior shopping arcades, rooftop bars and nightclubs, and steel balusters on balconies. The formal repetition projected American modernity, corporate efficiency, and consumer comfort as universally superior and globally exportable, the same logic that had guided the Jai Alai Auditorium’s placement in Burnham’s civic center fifteen years earlier. The extraction mechanism had shifted from gambling taxes to tourism revenue, but the architectural language had not. Taken together, the two auditoriums examined in this article and the broader network of practices they represent illuminate a distinct phase in the history of American imperial architecture. The New Deal era produced conditions of federal investment, expanding consumer culture, professional mobility, and new transportation technologies that enabled a different kind of imperial practice than the City Beautiful monumentalism of the early colonial period. Rather than projecting authority through civic order and classical form, this architecture projected modernity through spectacle, entertainment, and commercial infrastructure. It operated through professional networks rather than military administration, through gambling taxes and mortgage finance rather than direct occupation. Streamline Moderne was its aesthetic language precisely because its references to transportation technology could simultaneously symbolize American connectivity and commercial reach. While Wurdeman and Becket were among the first American architects to deploy this language across the Pacific, they were far from the last.

Conclusion

The China Clipper photograph with which this article opened captures a moment of genuine historical complexity. New Deal investment was expanding the American middle class; Commonwealth governance offered a real, if constrained, path toward Philippine independence; and its leader, Manuel Quezon, was a genuine champion of social reform, even as his development priorities consistently served elite and middle-class interests over the agrarian populations his rhetoric addressed. The technologies of flight and shipping that the image celebrates did connect two shores and create real possibilities for exchange. The cosmopolitan optimism it projects reflected the expanding middle classes on both shores, new circuits of travel and tourism, and a genuine appetite for the modernity that Pacific commerce promised. Two faces of an emerging imperial culture, the cosmopolitan and the extractive, found simultaneous architectural expression in the Pan-Pacific Auditorium and the Jai Alai Auditorium. Both buildings shared a visual language drawn from the ocean liners and cargo ships moving goods and capital across the Pacific. At the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, that language visualized the shipping routes connecting Los Angeles to Pacific markets. Transplanted to Manila’s civic center, the same formal vocabulary materialized the reverse flow, goods and capital extracted from Philippine territory and redirected toward American ports. Wurdeman and Becket’s practice illuminates that culture. The firm’s movement from Los Angeles to Manila was representative of a broader pattern in which American architects capitalized on the economic opportunism of the era, circulating between domestic urban development and overseas territorial governance. The Commonwealth period’s legal frameworks, financial structures, and architectural vocabularies persisted through the Cold War, adapted from entertainment auditoriums to luxury hotels, military installations, and corporate headquarters across Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.

What distinguishes the period from 1933 to 1945 from both the earlier colonial phase and the later Cold War deployments is its specific combination of optimism and extraction. The City Beautiful monumentalism of the early American colonial period made no pretense of Filipino agency. The Commonwealth period offered spectacle as a form of participation. Gambling, leisure, and cosmopolitan entertainment created the appearance of Filipino agency within structures that remained financially and legally controlled by American interests. The Hilton hotels and modernist civic buildings that followed during the Cold War operated in a world already reshaped by decolonization and superpower competition. Their ideological work was explicitly defensive, projecting American capitalism as freedom in direct opposition to Soviet communism, and addressed to a global audience already skeptical of US intentions. The Pan-Pacific auditoriums examined in this article occupied a different register. They promised modernity and delivered dependency, housed entertainment and generated revenue, and were designed by the same firm, in the same style, for patrons on both sides of the Pacific who understood themselves to be participants in a shared project of progress. That shared understanding was itself a product of an imperial culture that was built into the streamlined forms, the ocean liner aesthetics, and the Pan-Pacific rhetoric that surrounded both buildings from their inception. Reading these buildings together, across the Pacific rather than within national architectural histories, reveals the extent to which the built environments of this period constituted a transnationally constructed imperial landscape.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.