Here’s a sneak peek into my presentation on Singapore’s design scene and The Design Society Journal at the Kaohsiung Design Festival next week. I’ll be at the Editor — Chief Editor’s Forum with editors from other design magazines in Asia — CUTOUT, 號外, PPAPER, and Shopping Design — to discuss about design in Asia.
Apparently, the forum is already fully booked!
Singapore Architect has been published by the Singapore Institute of Architects since the 1960s and is one of the oldest architecture magazine in the region. It used to be called the SIAJ or Singapore Institute Architects Journal.
I flipped through its old issues a while back and was very captivated by the magazine’s covers. I decided to look through the archives in detail again, and here are even more gems that I discovered. These were the covers of magazines published between 1979-1981
I’m really curious who did these covers! Sounds like a story to chase.
After this phase of graphic covers, the magazine switched to photography on its covers, presumably because the technology allowed it to. It was only in 2008, when Kelley Cheng took over the magazine, did it start using graphic covers all over again. But, while the current graphic covers are a stylistic choice, I think these in the past were so because technology only offered these options!
If you’ve ever wondered about what makes Japanese culture unique, this brochure Roots of Japan(s): Unearthing the Cultural Matrix of Japan tells it all. Published by Japan’s Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry, this publication marks a shift in how the country promotes its creative industries, from its previous “Cool Japan” to “Creative Japan”. The aim: to communicate to Japanese and the world its unique brand of culture.
The book establishes the notion that Japan is made up of diverse cultures and briefly traces their history. What comes out of these lyrical pages edited by the Editorial Engineering Laboratory (a research institution “providing pilot models for the information age“) are exciting connections of Japan’s past, present and future. For instance, cosplay, an act of representation to bring a fantasy world to life, is traced to Japan’s Byobu screens, which once carried images of Chinese landscapes to the country’s hotel lobbies and banquet halls.
Besides outlining distinct Japanese traits, the book also theorises how its culture is generated, giving extremely fascinating insights to Japanese philosophies. Tarako (cod roe) Spaghetti, an Italian dish unique to Japan, is an instance of the trinity of concepts Shin-gyo-so, which are three basic styles of calligraphy that represent formal-casual-punk. As explained in the book:
“The pasta is cooked al dente, following the shin (authentic) Italian method, and sprinkled with dry seaweed according to the Japanese gyo (way). Eat with chopsticks rather than fork, and you’ll be so (grass) in style.”
Roots of Japan(s) was given out during the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in Bali, and there’s no information if you can get them anywhere else. However, you can hear the laboratory’s director Seigow Matsuoka talk about this book at the recent Creative Tokyo event website (with a voiceover in English translation; start from 22:40). You can also look at images of the book and read notes in Japanese about it here and here.