Pasay
— — the water that holds the longest light of the day.
Not only on a wall.
“A coastal city pressed against the bay, where Roxas Boulevard runs the seawall and the sun sets straight into the water for most of the year. Jeepneys turn off EDSA into side streets named for old fishing barrios. The Cultural Center sits on land reclaimed from the bay; the airport spills into the eastern districts. People come for the malls and the planes and the seawall benches in the late afternoon, when the sky over the water goes the colour of mango skin and the air finally cools. from the studio
Pasay, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Pasay is one of the sixteen cities of Metro Manila, sitting on the southern shore of Manila Bay and covering about 19 square kilometres. The population is roughly 440,000. It hosts Ninoy Aquino International Airport on its eastern flank and the Cultural Center of the Philippines complex on land reclaimed from the bay in the 1960s. The city was a fishing settlement called Pineda before it took the name Pasay in 1863; it became a chartered city in 1947. EDSA, the country's most famous avenue, terminates here at the SM Mall of Asia, one of the largest malls in Asia.
Manila Bay is the western boundary of the city, and for most of Pasay's history the bay has been the city's clock — fishermen at dawn, ferries through the day, the sunset that draws crowds to the seawall around six. The Roxas Boulevard promenade follows the water for about two kilometres of the Pasay frontage. The bay's water quality, long degraded by upstream runoff, has been the subject of a sustained rehabilitation programme launched by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in 2019, with reclamation projects continuing to reshape the shoreline.
Most visitors pass through Pasay without naming it: NAIA Terminal 1, 2, and 3 all sit inside the city, handling more than 45 million passengers a year before the pandemic. The Cultural Center of the Philippines, opened in 1969, anchors the bayside arts complex along with the Philippine International Convention Center. SM Mall of Asia, opened in 2006, draws around 200,000 visitors on weekend days. For travellers wanting the city itself rather than its facilities, the seawall stretch near the CCP and the old streets of Malibay are the closest thing to a walking neighbourhood.