Fourth cut. I’ve come to the very sad conclusion that I’m simply going to have to cut Clip/Stamp/Fold entirely and focus on the events and exhibitions that pertain to more contemporary media. This hurts. Really bad.
[What Remains of| THE âIMPROVISATORY, ANTI-SMOOTH, FUNNY-FORMATâ PERIODICALS OF THE 60S AND 70S
In 1966 Reyner Banham predicted that a new wave of little architecture magazines was revolutionizing the form of publication and signaling the arrival of a new architecture:
Wham! Zoom! Zing! Rave!âand itâs not Ready Steady Go, even though it sometimes looks like it. The sound effects are produced by the erupting of underground architectural protest magazines. Architecture, staid queen-mother of the arts, is no longer courted by plush glossies and cool scientific journals alone, but is having her skirts blown up and her bodice unzipped by irregular newcomers which areâtypicallyârhetorical, with-it, moralistic, mis-spelled, improvisatory, anti-smooth, funny-format, cliquey, art-oriented but stoned out of their minds with science-fiction images of an alternative architecture that would be perfectly possible tomorrow if only the Universe (and especially the Law of Gravity) were differently organized.[1]
Just as with the nascent architectural publications and little literary magazines of the early 20th-century, about which Iâve written elsewhere, the little architectural magazines of the 60s and 70s emerged from and responded to a socioeconomic and cultural context defined by change. In the 60s, Louis Martin explains, a new generation of architecture students âwas the first to learn of modern architecture in the academyâ; the âentire generation,â he claims, was on a âquestâŠfor a new architectural theory.â[3] Banham warned that âwhat we have hitherto understood as architectureâ might be incompatible with âwhat we are beginning to understand of technologyâ; the architect just might have to âdiscard his whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is recognized as an architect.â[4] Many of the architectural collectives publishing at this time (and it is significant that authorship was often assigned to collectives, rather than individuals) were aided by the rise of new technologies, including the IBM Selectric typewriter and the wider availability of offset lithography and copy shops, which enabled people other than large publishersânamely, students, avant-garde architects, individual theorists and criticsâto create their own small scale, short-run publications. In addition, the greater accessibility of air travel and the founding of underground press networks allowed for somewhat wider, through not indiscriminate, dissemination of these publications.
Benjamin Buchloh, speaking about his experience in the early 1970s as co-editor of experimental art magazine Interfunktionen, acknowledged the common perception among little or experimental magazine editors of the period that by âdismantl[ing]â the privileged discourses that typically surround the arts and architecture, and by adopting instead a more âimmediate and universal communicabilityâ in the form of text, these experimental publications made possible a ânew radical access and accessibility [to] and disseminationâ of art and architecture.[5] While architects were rejecting their âplush glossies,â little magazines in the visual arts, he said, were responding to Artforumâparticularly to its American focusâby âcreat[ing] a scene and a situation in whichâŠ[international] exchange became more tangible and more real.â We believed, Buchloh confessed that âmaking a magazine constructed a new spaceââthat through the magazine, âyou can have access to a public sphere, that you can actually reach an alternative communityâŠ.â[6]
Architects needed an alternative outlet because the economic stagnation of the 1970s meant that there was little work for them. â[T]he periods in which architects have less work are the periods in which the discipline pushes forward,â Colomina argues; architects have time âto think more, to write more, to reflect more.â[7] The little magazine was an ideal form and forum in which to do this thinking: âPaper could tolerate extreme ideas that were not always executable. It could integrate text and images, discourse and design, and through presentation expand architecture beyond its disciplinary limitations.â[8] Architect-publishers folded that paper into a variety of shapes and formats. While the early literary magazines played with form and content and, in the process, reflected or anticipated changes in literary culture, these second-generation little architecture magazines, the curators argue, âinstigated a radical transformation in architectural culture with the architecture of the magazines acting as the site of innovation and debate,â particularly debate about âthe role of politics and new technologies in architecture.â[9] âClip/Stamp/Foldâ thus serves to track âthe critical functionâ and form of these publications, which âdisseminated and catalyzed a range of experimental practices.â[10]
Yet the publications didnât only âdisseminate and catalyzeâ experimental practices. The publications were themselves an experimental practice; they demonstrated that âarchitectsâŠconceived of publication as an architectural project in its own right.â[11] Instead of designing buildings, architects designed publications. Colomina notes that the covers of these magazines rarely featured images of architects or buildings. âItâs a period in which buildings are not the thing to do. Itâs related to what Hans Hollein says on the cover of Bau: âEverything is architecture.ââ[12] Publications borrowed generously from popular culture and commercial media and, at the same time, were likely informed by âthe emerging practices of conceptual art,â which seemed to âpresen[]
an option to diffuse, distribute works of art [and architecture] outside of the market.â[13]
Many of the little magazines featured in âClip/Stamp/Foldâ offered, through their formal experimentation, reinterpretations of architecture. While many experimented with graphic and textual forms, and even borrowed content âgenresââlike restaurant and product reviewsâfrom mainstream media, others experimented with the physical form of their publications. These works were, as Banham described them, âimprovisatory, anti-smooth, funny-format.â Because the exhibition wall text, catalogues and websites offer formal descriptions of several publications, I will look here at just a few examples.[14] First, Archigramâs form was essential to its identity; as editor Peter Cook explained, âthe âgramâ aspect was very important. It should not be a magazine; it should be a âgramââlike an aerogram or a telegram. The key thing was that it was not a magâŠ.â[15] The gram has both a different form and a different temporality than a traditional magazine; it presents architecture as immediate, urgent, and as something communicated intimately between two parties. Second, Alison Sky, editor of On Site, formatted her publication so that âwhen opened up it was about the horizon, it was about the site, it was about vista; it was not about the object, the thing.â[16] The magazine constituted a landscape and created a physical architecture for reading. And third, Colomina and fellow editors of Carrer de la Ciutat created their magazine on an Olivetti typewriter: ââŠevery time you made a mistake it was hilarious because you had to redo itâŠ. We did not have hyphens; if it did not fit, you moved it to the next lineâŠ. In that sense we felt very much like architects.â[17] Thus the typewriter was a building tool in this publication-as-architecture enterprise.
One final example: When in 1966 he celebrated the eruption of âunderground architectural protest magazines,â Banham professed a particular interest in Clip-Kit, which Peter Murray started at Londonâs Architectural Association.
âŠ[T]wo more charisma-laden words just donât exist in this context. âKitâ is the emotive collective noun for Goodies (which are usually ideas, images, forms, documents, concepts raided from other disciplines) and âclipâ is how you put them together to make intellectual or physical structures. Alternatively, you can plug them into existing structures or networks. But plug-in or clip-on, itâs the same magpie world of keen artifacts, knock-out visuals and dazzling brainwaves assembled into structures whose primary aim seems to be to defy gravity, in any sense of the world.[18]
Murray remembers that Clip Kit made use of plastic bindings donated free by the manufacturer: âSo thatâs the âclipâ and this is the âkit.â For your first issue, basically, you got half a dozen pages, and then each month you got another clip.ââ[19] This is incremental, modular, do-it-yourself textual architecture. And its incremental constructionâhere at a moderate pace that might rival that of architectural constructionâagain reminds us of these magazinesâ unique relationship to timeâof their seriality, periodicity, timeliness.[20]
[TEXT FROM OUTTAKE #2 WOULD HAVE GONE HERE. HERE ARE THE FINAL LINES OF THE LAST PARAGRAPH:
It is unfortunate, Pratt says, âthat the curators did not include examples of conventional architectural publications from the period. The radical outpouring of text and image⊠is difficult to situate without an appreciation of the modernist orthodoxy that dominated architecture in the early 60sâ [12]. This is in part why Pratt, despite having an opportunity for a contextualized, embodied reading of Street Farmer, underestimates the âbasic goalsâ of the publications on display. He fails to appreciate the little magazinesâ place within, or response to, the dominant architectural context because, as many critics have noted, little of that cultural context is present in the exhibition. If it wereâif Pratt could contrast Street Farmer with a cotemporaneous mainstream title, like Architectural Forumâhe would see that Street Farmer did more than create âintellectual space.â It offered a street-agrarian alternative to modernismâs glass and steel corporate boxes and their analogue in the modern pageâs grids and columns. Modernism did not have architectonic space âdown well enoughââwhich is why these publications were created to remake it [13].]
Ultimately, though, many of these counterspaces, often built on irony, as Pratt notes, succumbed to un-ironic social conditions, or were co-opted by popular culture or a self-consciously serious academic culture. In the 1970s, the Vietnam War, energy crises, nuclear standoffs, and environmental concerns had âdampened enthusiasm for [the] unquestioned technological progressivismâ often promoted in the little magazines.[21] Meanwhile, many of the countercultureâs ârhetorical and visual techniquesâŠhad been subsumed into the consumer-driven material culture of the 70s.â Pratt explains that many of the earlier publications, Archigram in particular, used âimagery and rhetoric lifted from science fiction and other forms of popular fantasy (advertising copy, for example),â with the assumption that âtechnological development would fill the credibility gap.â The science fiction content of these publications demonstrates an acceptance of the myth of âtechnological progressivism,â an acceptance that results from a failure to question the position of architecture within the relations of production of its time.[22] Archigram and its kind, critics charge, simply reinforced normative modes of production, and some of these little magazines even became a part of the establishmentâif not commercial publishing, then the academic orthodoxy. Others, Ouroussoff writes, âspent long nights pondering whether their magazines had lost their freshness and should be shut down before they had been absorbed into the mainstream.â
âClip/Stamp/Foldâsâ exhibition timeline showed that by the late 1960s, fewer architecture publications were co-opting images from commercial culture, and more were borrowing from Continental philosophy. And as the magazine scene shifted from Europe to the United States, Simon Sadler argues, the avant-garde became professional:
No more âlittle magazines,â chaotically produced and distributed, left exposed to critique by poor theorization and cursory acknowledgements of history: step forward Venturiâs sleekly produced Complexity and Contradiction, all its words typeset on a letterpressâŠ. The meeting of Continental theory with American gravitas in the 1970s left zoom out of the circuit. American architectural criticism acquired a consistently severe tone.[23]
Enter Oppositions (1973-84), with its âfaux-Constructivistâ red-orange cover, Century Expanded typeface, âstrongly maintained grid, subtly off-square trim size, [the] expansive feel of the coated-stock cover with full gatefolds (on which were listed the publicationâs sponsors, which included some corporate and institutional contributors), and black and white printing on heavy glossy paper.â[24] The publication presented itself as an âattempt to âopposeââ other forms of architectural publication: the ââestablishedâ architectural review (i.e., Progressive Architecture), and the noncommercial review, which appears irregularly from the architecture schools (i.e., Perspecta).â[25] While it was not a university-sponsored publication, it represented a new self-conscious academic sophistication, featuring treatises by an exclusive group of theorists and criticism of a rotating line-up of heavy-hitting designers. Texts integrated ideas from other fields, including literature, philosophy, cultural studies, and film studies, and commonly applied post-Marxist, Frankfurt school, and particularly structuralist linguistic theoretical models to the study of architecture.
In 1973, the year Oppositions launched, Massimo Scolari had defined the âhealthiest architectural cultureâ as âthe one that concretely defends architecture as an autonomous fact, as a discipline.â[26] Oppositions seemed to take the opposite approach; many charged its brand of criticism with obfuscating the specificity of the architectural object and architectural practice.[27] Despite its publisherâs, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studiesâ, âparoxysms of self-consciousness,â Oppositions, in Ockmanâs estimation, proved itself âthe most provocative, original, and consistently high-quality American architectural publication of these years, overcoming an American provincialism in intellectual discourse.â[28] What ultimately sunk the publication, though, Ockman suggests, was likely a mix of the editorsâ polarization and âthe Instituteâs compromise of its original mandate as an antiestablishment institution[,which]âŠfollowed closely upon its bureaucratization, its cultivation as a fashionable salon and power base in New York, and its solicitation of mainstream patronage.â[29] Oppositions lost sight of its position in relation to the conditions of production and, consequently, got too big to be little.[30] Its demise marked the end of this phase of the little magazines.
X
Ouroussoff predicted that the âvisceral impactâ of the magazines on display at âClip/Stamp/Foldâ would remind todayâs architects of what theyâve forgotten: that behind each of these publications is the âcrazy notion that designâŠcouldâŠchange the world.â In other words, the embodied experience of these material forms should carry their promise of revolution. The âintoxicating freshnessâ of the little magazines of the 60s and 70s âshould send a shudder down the spine of those whoâve spent the last decade bathed in the glow of the computer screen.â[31] âClip/Stamp/Fold,â Ouroussoff says, âis a âpiercing critique, intended or not, of the smoothness of our contemporary design culture.â Their experimentation in form and content could inspire similar experimentation, promote a âsimilar intensityâ of innovation, among todayâs designers, who need to snap out of their CAD and Photoshop smoothness.[32] What âimprovisatory, anti-smooth, funny-formatâ media might designers create today to reinvigorate the architectural publication, to revive that âcrazy notionâ of revolution?, he seems to be asking.
*Â Â Â Â *Â Â Â Â *Â Â Â Â *Â Â Â Â *
[1] Reyner Banham, âZoom Wave Hits Architecture,â New Society 7:179 (1966): 21.
[2] Shannon Mattern, âClick/Scan/Bold/CUT: Outtake #1: Little Magazines of the Early 20th Centuryâ Wordsinspace (January 30 2011).
[3] Louis Martin, âAgainst Architectureâ Log 16 (2009): 162.
[4] Banham, Theory and Design, 329-30.
[5] Buchloh, âExperimental Magazinesâ
[6] This set of assumptions Buchloh now regards, however, as the âgreat delusionâ: âone doesnât know whether one should pity the moment that was naĂŻve to believe [that experimental publications had such revolutionary potential], or one should pity the moment now that doesnât have that naĂŻvetĂ© anymore.â
[7] Quoted in Adele Weder, An Interview with Beatriz Colomina Canadian Architect, July 2007, 13.
[8] Eran Neuman, âLittle Radicalism: Clip, Stamp Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196x-197xâ Journal of Architectural Education 61:3 (2008): 69-70, in EBSCOhost.
[9] âClip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196x â 197xâ Storefront for Art and Architecture, n.d.; âClip/Stamp/Fold: Aboutâ Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X, n.d.
[10] âClip, Stamp, Fold: The RadicalâŠâ
[11] Clip/Stamp/Fold 2 Exhibition Guide (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2007), 1. In 2001 Barcelona-based Actar launched a series of âboogazines,â âhybrid, thematic publication(s) that combin(e) the heterogeneity and topicality of a magazine with the referential and comprehensive approach of a bookâ âVerbâ Actar, n.d., http://www.actar.com. In a lengthy Archinect discussion about new architectural publication forms, editor Michael Kubo noted that most of Actarâs employees are architects, implying that they approach publishing as an architectural project. Michael Kubo, comment on Jourden, âVerb: Featured Discussion.â Other hybrid forms include OMA/AMOâs Content (Taschen 2004) and Hunch, the Berlage Instituteâs report, beginning with issue #12.
[12] Colomina quoted in Weder, 14. See also Craig Buckley, âFrom Absolute to Everything: Taking Possession in âAlles ist Architekturâ Grey Room 28 (2007): 108-22.
[13] Buchloh, âExperimental Magazines.â
[14] I review various critiques of the exhibition, focusing especially on how it presents the periodicals as material objects, here: Shannon Mattern, âClick/Scan/Bold/Cut: Outtake #2: Clip/Stamp/Fold Exhibition Reviewsâ Wordsinspace.net (January 30, 2011).
[15] Quoted in Clip/Stamp/Fold Exhibition Guide (New York: Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2006-7), 1.
[16] Quoted in Clip/Stamp/Fold Exhibition Guide, 4.
[17] Quoted in Clip/Stamp/Fold Exhibition Guide, 3.
[18] Banham, âZoom Wave.â
[19] Quoted in Clip/Stamp/Fold Exhibition Guide, 3. âArchigram goes one better,â Scott Brown boasts. âIssue 7 comes in separate unnumbered sheets, mailed in a plastic bagâ Scott Brown, 228. Then Volume magazine, a joint-venture between Dutch magazine Archis, Rem Koolhaasâs firm AMO/OMA, and C-Lab, the Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting, arrived in 2005. Taking on any of a variety of modalities, it could be a magazine, an object, a space, an event, a debate, a webcast, a consultancy, a talkshow, travel, and âother surprises.â Volume, â4+5=Editorial,â Volume 1 (2005).  The first issue came in a plastic âsushi boxâ with embossed lettering, and the box in turn contained an installation: âThere were numerous items in the box, or âinstallation space,â including the magazine proper, CDs or DVDs, posters, cards, stickers, etcâŠ. Like Aspen Magazine, it was an example of a nice eclectic set of materials you could compile with the help of your friends.â Jeffrey Inaba, comment on Jourden, âFeatured Discussion: Volume.â Thus, not only was this an exhibition, it was a DIY, âuser-createdâ exhibition, one that seemed to embrace the zine ethos.
[20] Italian Harck was meant to have only one or two issues; its short life made it a âlittle intellectual time bomb.â Nicolai Ouroussoff, âSuch Cheek! Those Were the Days, Architectsâ New York Times, Feb 8, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com.
[21] Pratt 113.
[22] The images of Superstudio, Archizoom, 9999, and other Florentine groups, Massimo Scolari writes, âremain silent before the progress of the discipline, since they understand progress simply as change, mutation, diversity, and not as active, operative clarification.â This visual content thus does nothing to challenge the dominant modes of architectural production. âTechnology, apparently exorcised in comic-book shrieks, thus reveals itself to be the crude ideological expression of the very same system one had wanted to negate.â Scolari, âThe NewâŠ,â 129.
[23] Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 190.
[24] Joan Ockman, âResurrecting the Avant-Garde: The History and Program of Oppositions,â in Architectureproduction, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 188-9.
[25] Mario Gandelsonas, in A.M.C.: Architecture Movement ContinuitĂ©, quoted in Ockman, âResurrecting,â 194.
[26] Scolari, âThe NewâŠ,â 131.
[27] Gusevich, âThe Architecture of Criticismâ; Martin, âAgainst Architecture.â
[28] Ockman, âResurrecting,â 198.
[29] Ockman, âResurrecting,â 198-9. For a discussion of Assemblageâs (1985-2000) similar failure to extend its critique of architectureâs institutions to a critique of the journal itself, see Christopher Graig Crysler, Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism and the Built Environment, 1960-2000 (New York: Routledge, 2003).
[30] See also Scott Brown, âLittle Magazinesâ and Louis Martin, âNotes on the Origins of Oppositionsâ in Architectural Periodicals in the 1960s and 1970s: Toward a Factual, Intellectual and Material History, eds., Alexis Sornin, HĂ©lĂšne JanniĂšre & France Vanlaethem, Proceedings, International Colloquium, Canadian Centre for Architecture, MontrĂ©al, May 6-7, 2004 (MontrĂ©al: Institut de recherchĂ© en historie de lâarchitecture, 2008), 161-3. Perspecta, Yaleâs student-edited journal founded in 1952, held a similarly liminal position, between big and little, institutional and independent. Denise Scott Brown argued that âpublications such as Yaleâs Perspecta and Harvardâs ConnectionâŠcan by no stretch of the imagination be called little magazines. They are well produced glossies of high academic standing.â Quoted in Peter Eisenman, âThe Big Little Magazine: Perspecta 12 and the Future of the Architectural Pastâ Architectural Forum, October 1969, 74-5, 104.
[31] Ouroussoff, âSuch Cheek.â
[32] âClip, Stamp, Fold: The RadicalâŠ.â