We Promise to Keep You Posted

Several people have called me in recent weeks with best wishes and, above all, questions about what the future holds for our magazine, WaterShapes.

That’s a reasonable inquiry, and the honest answer is that I don’t know just yet: I’m doing what I can to chart a course into the future and find ways to build on the magazine’s foundation with something new and wonderful, but the simple truth is that everything is taking more time to coalesce than I had hoped.

Partly it has to do with the fact that the economy is still so contrary: I start spinning visions of a tomorrow in which watershaping is an absolute, thematic core of residential and commercial design and architecture, and then the questions about the construction industry’s deep, blue funk start coming fast and furious and all I can do is point out that these things always turn around and that the future is invariably bright.

Then the questions boil down to the essence: When?

Back in 2008, as we dipped our feet in a recession the likes of which none of us had ever seen, my conviction was that the general economy would turn around by 2011 and that construction would lag behind by two or three years – but that there would be enough going on by now that spirits would be lifted and we’d all see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I was partly correct, but I think now that recovery in the construction markets will lag behind the rest of the economy for a few more years I hadn’t anticipated. Who would have thought that credit would still be so tight, or that real estate values would have failed to stabilize by now?

I am profoundly impressed that so many of you have stuck with watershaping through thick and thin — apparently with significantly more resilience than our magazine — and that the gains in creativity and technical excellence made in the last decade have not gone by the wayside. The fact that so many of you are still in the fight is what encourages me to keep going myself.

We’ll be back. The question is one huge When? — and all I can suggest is that you watch this space for news. We promise to keep you posted.