From Singapore’s flag to its public housing: celebrating 50 years of design in the Lion City
An exhibition at the city state’s National Design Centre shows how design has been woven into the fabric of the republic since its birth half a century ago
When Singapore started on its path towards independence in the late 1950s, it needed help from an unlikely source: designers. “Design is seen not just in the traditional form of aesthetics but also about designing systems, services and processes,” says Jeffrey Ho, executive director of the DesignSingapore Council, a government agency that promotes design. “Design has played a key role in the way Singapore’s systems were designed over the last 50 years.”
A young country needs an identity and that’s exactly what it got. First came the red-and-white national flag, with five Chinese stars and an Islamic crescent, which was unveiled in 1959. When Singapore became a republic six years later, it began a series projects that continue to define the city state, from a 1971 urban plan that called for the construction of modernist high-density housing estates, to Singapore Airlines’ sarong kebaya uniform, designed by Pierre Balmain in 1972, which draws inspiration from traditional Malay clothing.
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Now Singapore is looking back at these designs and how they shaped the country. “We wanted to show that design is everywhere,” says Yann Follain, curator of “Fifty Years of Singapore Design”, an exhibition at the National Design Centre that charts the evolution of Singaporean design through the country’s first 50 years of independence.
The show delves into the private collections of designers and some of Singapore’s biggest companies to extract artefacts, archival photos and unexpected information. “The best help we got was from the designers themselves,” says Follain. Sometimes they needed a gentle push. “Most of the designers are very humble,” says Follain. “They all talk about their designs in service to something greater.”
When they did open up, the designers revealed some surprises, as when veteran industrial designer Chew Moh Jin mentioned in passing that he had designed the Unica plastic stool, a durable, stackable and ubiquitous piece of furniture found in nearly all of Singapore’s hawker centres and kopi tiam (traditional coffee shops). “It’s a product that everyone has used but nobody knew it was designed in Singapore,” says Follain.
The exhibition features other objects pulled from everyday life, too, like the emergency stop levers found on MRT trains. “It reveals the story behind things [Singaporeans] have been seeing for the past 50 years.”