Rewind

2007 was a year of massive change. Quoting Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries, “Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces. It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational, and interconnected.”

Besides being a worldwide issue, massive change could not be more relevant to the region of Asia, which is has given prolific birth to countless new cities. As our friends from movingcities have so aptly put it, “To understand the contemporary complexity and reality of cities we have to engage with them in a different way; not as fixed entities, stable places, but as organisms that can grow, shrink, think, perform and act accordingly to influences from the inside as well as from the outside.”

Looking back, when the idea for Five Foot Way Magazine was hatched in the middle of 2007, Asia was very much in the constant state of flux as it is now. However, what remained missing was a window on Asia and its cities; a looking glass where people could look into the wonderland that was evolving, every week, every day, and every hour. Five Foot Way was founded as a platform for the exploration and discourse of Asian architecture, aimed at people who had the want and drive to make a difference in the built environment.

Five Foot Way began its life as a simple blog, covering local Singaporean news like the proliferation of white sites, as a part of an effort to remain relevant to current issues involving Asian cities. The month of May saw the opening of the National University of Singapore’s City Exhibition, in the Vivocity Mall, where a plethora of student work was showcased to untrained public eyes. Deemed a success by the school, the exhibition drew at least some attention away from the glitz and glamour of neighboring retail stores in the name of architecture and urbanism.

2007 was a good year for education in the profession; both for those engaged in practice and for the public. The Archi Fest ‘07 held late November to early December saw fourteen speakers from various countries meeting to engage in a series of talks and forums that involved the media, the public, and the local design fraternity.

2007 was also a year for reflection. In Singapore, debate arose around a competition to establish the country’s National Art Gallery; leading to a series of FFW articles exploring the Gallery’s conception while questioning its place in the city and its consciousness. To date, the competition has come to its final shortlist…we hope the best team wins. Local finalists Chan Sau Yan Associates and Lekker Design are arguably the most apt scheme to reflect the nation’s maturing architecture and design fraternity; what better commission to confirm this than the National Art Gallery? Personally, artistic showcase was always a great way to broadcast architecture, and vice versa.

Held in a nondescript shop house on Ann Siang Hill in Singapore, it was hard to tell if the Magical Spaces Project was trying to be coolly obscure, or call attention to novelty. Concurrent with the emergence of en-bloc sales and massive redevelopment of Singapore, the project really sought the public’s awareness of the architectural heritage that Singapore possessed, and strove for a consciousness of any city’s idiosyncrasies and inherent value. Singapore proved to be an ideal starting point for the campaign, as the Singaporean public and creative community demonstrated with generosity and raw artistic expression. What made this one especially magical was the manner in which local society at all scales, from local design bookstore Basheer Graphicbooks to the creatives from the local studios of FARM and The Asylum collaborated to make the project’s final exhibition and book a possibility.

2007 has been the year for local design. This has not been more apparent than in Asia, where local architecture and design has proven itself truly worthy. FFW kept abreast with the success with interviews with architects from all over the Southeast Asian Region, from Colin Seah from the Ministry of Design in Singapore, to Kevin Mark Low of Small Projects in Malaysia. Proponents of thoughtful, contextually rooted, level-headed architecture that we so constantly yearn for, Asian architects provided a balance to the prolific madness that is globalized design.

2007 was a year of massive change. As the world changed overnight, the magazine underwent its own transformation. With the arrival of big 2008, we’ve had welcome additions to the Five Foot Way, with healthy contributions from friends in China, Japan and Singapore. Nestled in the fabric of the Chinese capital of Beijing, Bert de Muynck and Monica Carrico from movingcities.org explore and try to demystify the phenomenon that is the contemporary city in Asia. Darryl Wee works as a translator and writer in Tokyo by day; but by night he’s scouring the city for news and angles on architecture and urbanism in the land of the rising sun. Together with Hong Guan, Debbie, Fabian, Kex, and Danette providing coverage from FFW’s Singapore base, the Five Foot Way is acquiring a more cosmopolitan outlook.

With 2008, we hope to forge more friendships, and cross more boundaries that would allow us and our readers greater insight into architecture and urbanism in Asia; with its quickening, albeit frightening pace of metamorphosis.

 

Here’s wishing you a happy new year.

JJ is co-founder of 5ft Creatives and is currently based in New York.