The Aduana Building served as the offices of the Bureau of Customs (BOC), until it was renovated and declared as the Malacañang sa Sugbo by Pres. Maria Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (born 1947), to serve as her office when she would be travelling to the Visayas.
The building was left to disrepair and disuse, when Pres. Arroyo ended her term in 2010, until the national government took over and reopened the edifice as the National Museum of the Philippines – Cebú in 2023.
What is interesting about the design of the Aduana building is that Parsons did not overly use any neoclassical elements typical of his Federal styled buildings throughout the Philippines. Instead, Parsons used some portal columns, but drew heavily from Spanish era buildings, and he even incorporated the capiz shell (Piacuna placenta) windows that were typical of the Spanish colonial era with modern geometric simplicity as promoted by the Austrian architect Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos (1870-1933) and American architect Frank Lloyd Wright Sr. (1867-1959).
Arch. William Edward Parsons (1872-1939) was the architectural consultant of the American government in the Philippines, from 1905 to 1914. Parsons first took his formal architectural studies at the Yale University, then continued his advanced education at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Parsons worked for the architect and urban planner Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846-1912), during the 1893 Chicago World Fair, who was impressed by the young Parsons. From 1901 to 1905, Burnham was shuttling between the Philippines and America, as he was supervising the urban planning and design of Manila, Baguio, the Pangasinan Provincial Capitol in Lingayen, and Negros Occidental Provincial Capitol in Bacolod; while working on American projects in the cities of Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, San Francisco and Washington D.C.; this was heavy work load that forced Burnham to discontinue his Philippine obligations and recommend Parsons as his replacement to the then-So when the United States Secretary of War, William Howard Taft (1857-1930). Parsons arrived in Manila in 1905, and was able to work as both architectural consultant and a private practitioner. Upon his arrival, Parsons organized the American and Filipino staff of the architectural office of the Bureau of Public Works. As the chief architect of the US government, Parsons employed the Neoclassical style propagated by the American colonial government but infused it with Art Deco and Filipino elements, such as wide capiz shell windows. Parsons’ major buildings include the Philippine General Hospital, the Normal School and its women’s dormitory, the Manila Hotel, the Army-Navy Club, the Elks Club, and the Young Men’s Christian Association or YMCA Building; as well as the provincial government buildings in Cebu, Legaspi, Tarlac, and Capiz. Aside from grand government buildings, Parsons design the basic format for all public schools to be constructed between 1907 and 1946; which he called the Gabaldon schoolhouse, after Assemblyman Isauro Gabaldón y González (1875-1942), who authored the bill to construct modern schools nationwide. Due to conflicts with government policies, Parsons resigned in 1914, and returned to America to do consultancy work for various cities with the firm Bennett, Parsons & Frost, before quietly retired in New Haven, Connecticut, until his death in 1939.
