In the social media age, enthusiasm for paper architectural magazines remains undimmed. Editors behind three recent launches consider the perennial appeal of printed pages
The Journal of Civic Architecture
I grew up in a house without many books, but there always seemed to be lots going on. Family celebrations, more or less related to significant events involving church and the signing of books, books of congratulations or condolences. In 2011 I published my first book with a small academic German press with no fanfare, no party, no occasion.
Shortly afterwards I was approached by the publisher of Black Dog and Artifice Books, who wrote a letter stating that he had just published a book with O’Donnell & Tuomey Architects, was about to do so with Jamie Fobert, and would like his next book to be about the work of my practice, Lynch Architects. You can imagine how difficult it was to resist this suggestion. It felt like I was being invited to join a club, or to attend a very, very good party. I ended up publishing two books with Artifice, ‘Mimesis’, in 2015, and ‘Civic Ground’, in 2017. We celebrated the launch of both at the AA Bookshop with all of our friends and colleagues. It was a LOT of fun.
Top, above: The third issue of the Journal of Civic Architecture (JoCA) was recently published. Each edition has a print run of 500 copies, and is available to purchase from Magma, Margaret Howell, the AA Bookshop, and canalsidepress.com.
At the party for ‘Mimesis’, someone asked me why, in the digital age, would anyone want to produce a book, and such a bookish book as that. The same answer pertains to why one would publish a journal – or a book by other authors: because books are precious, not as objects per se (although books are particularly lovely things), but precious because they bring out the best in people. A book or a journal is always a celebration of something that someone thinks worth commemorating, worth remembering. They introduce diverse people to each others’ diverse points of view, and reading a good journal (or book), at least the ones I like best, is very similar to listening in on and feeling part of an exciting conversation.
The pursuit of knowledge is akin to city life in general, Aristotle believed. The purpose of both is friendship. The JoCA is, I hope, both serious fun and an urbane endeavour and pastime. It brings together people who wouldn’t otherwise meet, and allows me to deepen existing friendships and begin new ones. Its publication is not linked to the university calendar, nor to anything obviously ritualistic, though it is deliberately tied to the winter and summer solstices, and gives us a good reason to hold an informal symposium twice a year and to reflect on cosmic themes. Symposium, as I’m sure you remember, is actually just a drinking party, and so the JoCA is a very good excuse for a knees-up. Bearing in mind the current state of the world, and of the internet, we need as many excuses to celebrate intellectual friendships as possible.
Afterparti
Afterparti is an architecture-infused collective with an event-and-zine series of the same name. The nine of us involved met on the Architecture Foundation’s inaugural New Architecture Writers programme (N.A.W.), which was initiated to address the limited range of voices in the architectural press.
Carrying the N.A.W. torch, we wanted to create platforms for radical, under-represented voices in the culture and criticism of architecture and design. Each publication takes its departure point from a preceding public event and becomes a printed platform for writing, for imagining and for keeping our on-stage conversations alive.
Afterparti issue #00, published by the Afterparti collective, whose founding members are Siufan Adey, Thomas Aquilina, Nile Bridgeman, Marwa El Mubark, Josh Fenton, Samson Fumasan, Tara Okeke, Aoi Phillips and Shukri Sultan. The magazine is available at Afterparti events and via stockists including the Architecture Foundation and magculture.com.
Architectural publications are often full of safe content and opinions. We were bored of seeing a limited range of voices exploring a limited range of topics. Self-publishing allowed us to open up conversations on important but insufficiently discussed topics, and reach out to a mix of under-represented voices, exciting upstarts and established figures.
Our prototype zine, Issue #00, became an experiment in style, voice and collaboration. Our live debate, ‘The Time for Failure is Now’, was the catalyst for the content. Articles in the zine directly respond to quotes from the event; building upon them, challenging them or subverting them. Contributors produced a mix of personal, provocative and playful pieces about cities and people, all of which seek to activate change and broaden perspectives.
We’re more interested in cities than buildings, and more interested in their inhabitants than designers. When talking architecture, we always want to take the discussion beyond beauty. And we want to invite as many people as possible to engage in that conversation with us.
Citizen
Citizen is a quarterly magazine aimed at everybody engaged with the challenge of designing innovative proposals to bring about real improvements to the city. Its mission is unashamedly bold: to promote and develop ideas that build on the agenda of the London School of Architecture — to allow people living in cities to have more fulfilled and more sustainable lives. It’s born of a belief that design is a transformative force. It practices what it preaches. What better way to do that than in print? We are privileged to work with the brilliant graphic designers, Simon Esterson Associates. The magazine looks great, but just as importantly, it offers up its content in a way that is enjoyable, accessible and carefully paced.
Launched in July 2019 by the London School of Architecture, Citizen is a new quarterly magazine “for everyone engaged with the challenge of creating the future city”.
It’s a substantial magazine – 176 pages – with a huge range of types of content. Good old magazine-craft – rhythm, sign-posting, captions, headlines, standfirsts – are key to imposing a logic, an order, a charm, on what could all too easily become a bewildering, overwhelming mess. You could argue that you can use the same box of tricks to present content online. And to an extent that’s true, but not to quite the same effect: you can’t nail the perfect flat plan; You can’t appreciate the joy of matching (and, in this case, combining) different paper stocks to complement different types of content; and you don’t end up with something you can hold.
We love the fact that it takes up space, a substantial weight in your bag or desk, not a tab in your browser that you never get round to reading. We particularly like the fact that it takes so much time, and effort and care to produce. Yes it’s slow, particularly when compared to social media. But this is an asset too. Print is refined; what you see and read on paper has gone through an extensive process to get there. It takes serious commitment. We expect it to be taken seriously in return.
