Photographed in 1899, this structure once stood in San Pedro Macati at the site of present day Makati Poblacion Park. Originally associated with General Pío del Pilar and later used by Brigadier General Charles King during the Philippine American War, the headquarters functioned as a wartime command site during a period of military conflict and urban transformation.

At the turn of the twentieth century, San Pedro Macati became a strategic area south of Manila due to its proximity to the Pasig River, an important corridor for movement, trade, and military operations.

Scan the archival image to enter the reconstructed environment.

Visitors are brought into San Pedro Macati, 1899, where the headquarters reappears within its surrounding landscape. Instead of encountering the present day park, viewers stand before a bahay na bato structure with a stone lower level and elevated wooden upper floors.

Wide window openings allow visitors to approach and look inside. However, the interiors remain intentionally unresolved due to the absence of archival documentation.

The experience intentionally avoids prescribed pathways or guided viewing sequences. Visitors are free to move around the structure and explore it from different perspectives, allowing spatial understanding to emerge through self directed movement and observation.

By allowing visitors to stand directly in front of the reconstructed headquarters, the experience emphasizes bodily scale and spatial proximity rather than detached observation.

The reconstruction was optimized for lightweight mobile deployment through low polygon modeling and compressed textures, allowing the experience to remain accessible through browser based WebAR without requiring app downloads.

Each AR experience remained under 3 MB to support faster loading and public accessibility within café environments using Wi Fi connectivity.

The headquarters reveals more than architecture. It reflects a period when Makati was transitioning from a riverside settlement into a growing civic and urban landscape ([LINK: City Government of Makati], 2006).

As a bahay na bato structure, the headquarters reflects both colonial influence and local adaptation, combining masonry construction with climate responsive design principles.

Through AR, the site becomes legible again not simply as a park, but as a place shaped by conflict, occupation, governance, and everyday life.

The project also explores how digital heritage can operate outside formal museum settings. By deploying the reconstruction within cafés around Poblacion, encounters with history emerge through casual discovery rather than institutional visitation.

Cafés functioned as accessible community spaces where visitors could engage with archival material while already moving through the neighborhood represented by the reconstruction itself.

By situating the experience within everyday social environments, the project explores how heritage can emerge through incidental discovery rather than formal instruction.

The reconstruction intentionally preserves historical gaps.

• Interior spaces remain unmodeled

• Undocumented features were excluded

• Interpretations are grounded only in surviving evidence

• Ambiguous areas remain visually unresolved rather than speculatively reconstructed

These absences form part of the experience and reflect the limitations of the historical record itself.

Rather than presenting a seamless or authoritative version of the past, the project acknowledges reconstruction as an interpretive process shaped by incomplete evidence.

The headquarters has disappeared, replaced by urban development.

Through augmented reality, the site can be encountered again through archival photographs and historical reconstruction. By reintroducing the headquarters into everyday urban space, the project reveals how traces of conflict, transformation, and urban memory continue to shape present day Makati even when physical structures no longer survive.

The reconstruction repositions a disappeared wartime landscape within contemporary Poblacion, allowing visitors to encounter fragments of Makati’s layered past through immersive storytelling and public facing digital heritage interpretation.

California State Library. ([1899?]). San Pedro MacCati – deserted entrenchments of the Amigos [Photograph]. California History Section Picture Catalog. https://delivery.library.ca.gov:8443/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE276382

City Government of Makati. (2006). Barangay Poblacion: Its cultural mapping as the heritage district of Makati. Stampa Offset Inc. Published with technical assistance from FEATI University College of Architecture and support from the Instituto Cervantes Spanish Program for Cultural Cooperation.

Cullum, G. W. (1900). Biographical register of the officers and graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point (Vol. 4, p. 162). Houghton, Mifflin and Company. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Army/USMA/Cullums_Register/2136*.html

Hoffman, A. (2025). A succession of U.S. Army Kings. The Bugle, 32(2), 17. Wisconsin Veterans Museum. https://issuu.com/wisvetsmuseum/docs/the_bugle_spring_2025_v_32_2

Keystone-Mast Collection. (n.d.). General King’s Headquarters, San Pedro Macati, Philippine Islands [Stereo photograph]. California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt6t1nc08t

United States National Archives. (1899). Former headquarters of General Pilar, now headquarters of General Charles King, San Pedro de Makati, Manila, 1899 [Photograph]. Wisconsin Philippines Image Collection, University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries. https://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/A33RGFACPGTMK9A

Wilcox, M. (Ed.). (1900). Harper’s history of the war in the Philippines (p. 138). Harper & Brothers. https://digilib.ust.edu.ph/digital/collection/section5/id/56809