Architectural Magazines: Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy - More on Clip/Stamp/Fold
It's hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of nostalgia surrounded by the covers of the so called 'Little Magazines' on display at at the Clip/Stamp/Fold exhibition in the AA gallery. But, I realise it's a nostalgia for a time I never knew. It's what you might call a pseudo-Proustian rush at the sight of these fabled folded magazines. There are airbrushed robots having sex, collages of Santa Maria del Fiore relocated to a forest with reel-to-reel data tape machines, comics, slogans and jokes. It's not my scene, because I wasn't even born when a lot of this stuff came out, but for many reasons these things are so embedded in current architectural culture that they feel like part of my experience. Those youthful faces staring out from these publications are - at least some of them - still around and (older, balder, fatter) staring out of much glossier publications these days. The ideas that seem to graphically detonate on these dog-eared copies are still around too. Why? Because though these things look ridiculously over-excited and adolescent, they were the work of deadly serious obsessives, hell bent on changing architectural culture. Perhaps there is another reason why the magazine is such an important medium - especially in UK architectural culture. In some ways the magazine is the origin of the post-war boom in architectural discourse. I'm thinking specifically of John McHale's tin trunk full of American magazines that galvanised the Independent Group. The things that Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton cut up to make images such as 'Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So ...." . The kind of thing the Smithson's were talking about in 'Today We Collect Adverts'. The sort of thing full of products and lifestyles that enthused Reyner Banham. (And of course - these are same techniques that we later see used in Archigrams collage-drawings. We also see Archigram inherit a set of interests from the Independent Group - at least Banham's idea of Independent Group architecture and Richard Hamiltons man-machine-love. Magazine lovers become magazine makers). [An aside: An earlier Strangeharvest post drew a comment from John McHale's son with claims for a different progeny for that iconic British pop image: "You may be interested to know that R. Hamilton did not design the Pop collage 'Just What Is It That Makes Todays Homes So Different, So Appealing?' According to my father the collage was designed by John McHale while at Yale and the measured design specifying all the images was provided in advance to Hamilton. The visual items for the collage were in McHale's black metal tin trunk that was shipped over ahead of time to McHale's studio in London and which Magda Cordell helped Hamilton and his wife access. Hamilton did not design the work, he merely cut out and pasted down the Pop Poster collage, with the assistance of his wife Tery, and Magda Cordell. The collage is based on the layout - with a few transpositions - of the living/sitting room of the McHale Cordell atellier at 52 Cleveland Square in London."] If you keep following this thread it will lead you to today's architectural mainstream. Archigram were whizzier and hipper than the Independent Group architects, they also became the paper-architect template for a later generation - shaping a generation of AA alumni: Danny, Rem, Zaha and so on, whose patience at the drawing board was eventually rewarded in ways Archigram can only dream of. Maybe McHales tin trunk is the reason the magazine assumed such a significant position at that particular moment. The magazine became the site for architectural reverie and conjecture. It was both the place that you could glimpse the exotic world of consumerist America and where you could manufacture new exotic worlds. Magazines were a way of getting hold of culture and remaking it, of forming a critical position in relation to mass culture by manipulating its very essence. Staking out positions, and transforming culture are exactly what these magazines are doing. Though tiny in circulation, their ambition (and ego) is gigantic. Though read by a few, their desire to communicate, provoke, debate is immense. My all time favourite is almost included in the show - visible in the mag-cover wallpaper in the AA hallway- the New Society Non-Plan issue which proposed a radical version of city-making with humour, satire, common sense and awareness of the pressures and problems facing planning at that time in the UK. It brought together Cedric Price, Reyner Banham and Peter Hall (amongst others) - a kind of urban thinking supergroup. It's amazing to think that this happened in magazine that wasn't about architecture (and depressing to think that there's been nothing like it since). In many ways, they are not really magazines, but secret messages between groups: gang signs between brotherhoods. They are ridiculously utopian - visions of the world changed, kits and instruction manuals describing how to remake culture. They are independent, small circulation labours of love, and almost certainly bottomless pits which money disappeared into. There are some strange anomalies in the show: A number of properly funded and distributed magazines sneak in - Casabella, AD and so on, which undermine the knocked together in student digs quality of true fanzines. Perhaps the strangest thing of all is that you can't read any of the content. It's as though you're in a particularly officious newsagents ('its not a library, you know!) where you can only stare at the covers. Or perhaps it's as tantalising and frustrating as a display of menus describing the most delicious and appetising dishes you'll never taste. There is a manifest thrill that is absent from contemporary architectural publications - which come in a number of sober flavours: journalistically corporate (regurgitating press releases), sensationalist (shock as roof leaks!), flip (where irony passes for knowledge), deathly serious visionless prose which reads as though written as a parody of 1950s criticism, academicese that strangles itself with linguistic garrottes, moralistic practicalism (most likely written by an architecture tutor who is exchanging romantic text messages with a student behind his heavily pregnant girlfriends back). There is an argument that this kind of thing now happens on the internet. But I'm not so sure. Blogging allows people express themselves, to create audiences and so on. But it's different: more isolated, and lacks the drama. It's also - strangely - an inhibited form which has posts of a certain length, images of a certain size and type, stories of a certain kind. It is amazing how quickly the internet congealed into formal typologies. But it does allow people to pursue their own interests in a way that commissioning editors would never tolerate. See this review of Strangeharvest by way of example: Strangeharvest is ..."like most blogs, something that exists in the mind of one person who lives in an aliased world where the voices in their schizophrenic head can actually BE heard by everybody else and their paranoid beliefs can be exorcised. In this public autotherapy everybody else can find true entertainment at the expense of the possessed."
Posted by anothersam at December 4, 2007 12:42 AM.
Contents:
More Scenes In Cartoon Deserta
Generic Powerpoint Template: Delivering Bad News
The Best New Building In London
Book Review: The Infrastructural City
The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
Now Showing: John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt
Obscure Design Typologies: Life Guard Chairs
Osama bin Laden Cigarette Lighter: Novelty Products as Congealed Culture
Absurd Car Crashes: A Eulogy for J.G. Ballard
Now Showing: Dan Grahams 'Rock My Religion'
This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
Church of the Literal Narrative
Philadelphias Floating Architecture
Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
Giant Soviet Signs Cut Into Forests
Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
2 The Lighthouse: Self Storage & Architectural Hallucinations
Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe: Infrastructure as Architectural Subconcious.
Viva Sectional Cinematography!
Now Showing: The Installation of an Irreversible Axis on a Dynamic Timeline
Sim Seasons Greetings! The Rise of Neo-Winter
Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
Yard Filth: Next Years Hot Look
Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
The Secret Language of Surface
Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
Moving Houses: Buildings In Motion
Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
Inflatable Icebergs: Sublimated Guilt Has Never Been So Fun
The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
If London Were Like Venice: Antique Geo-Poetic Speculations and Hydro-Fantasy
41 Hours in an Elevator: The Movie
NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
Dogs: Britains Greatest Design Obsession
Detroit Sucks: The Motor Shows Last Gasp
Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
Folk Football: Landscape, Space and Abstraction
A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
The Camoufluers and the Day-Glo Battleship
Pseudoccino: Instant Coffee Foam
Blown Up: More Inflatable Military Stuff
On Christmas Trees, Folk Forests and Staples Office Supplies
Hampton Courts Shrouded Sculptures
Named Fabric: 20 Sponsored Pieces of Architecture at the New Museum
Form Follows Felony: The Secret Home of the Un-Dead Canoeist.
Architectural Magazines: Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy - More on Clip/Stamp/Fold
James Bond Lives Next Door: Suburban Imagery as Industry
The Ghost of Christmas Futurism
Chapters for an Imaginary Book About Architecture
Shrouded Plinth - Urban Striptease
In the Night Garden - Surreal Landscape of Nostalgia
Kim Jong II, The Great Architect
Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway
The Marc Bolan Memorial Crash Barrier.
Enjoy The Silence: Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
In Search of Britains Vehicular History
Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
I Like Your Manifesto, Lets Put it to the Test-o
How to Become a Famous Architect
Northampton - Sci-fi Pop Planning Promotion
Advertising Central Milton Keynes
The Velvet Underground at the Glass House
Duplikate: Kate Moss on the Production Line of Individuality
Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials
Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
Church of the Ascension and Descension
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
The Most Visited Location in the UK
Anything to Feel Weightless Again: The Cargo Lifter and the Tropical Island Resort
'Its beauty will know no season'
2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
Imperfect Pitch - Football, Space and Landscape
Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
Suburban Growth: Matthew Moores Field of Dreams
Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
A Little Light Product Placement
Some Advice To A Young Designer
Useless Proclamations for a Beautiful City
Topsy Turvy VSBA: Inverted Heros of an Upside Down Avant Guard
Everything Flows: ideological cartography
How Geostationary Was My Valley?
The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
In a Lonely Place - Under Construction
Mach 3 Nitro Gel - Design that's foaming at the mouth.
Marchitecture. Architectural things to do in London this March
What happens when you cross a pen with a car?
Football Pitch: Best of British
The First Cut is the Cheapest - Blenheim Palace: pop architecture that goes for the jugular
Holiday Snap II : Giant Glowing French Balls
Holiday Snap: Canadian War Memorial, Vimy, France
Anatomy of an Architectural News Story
Its All About the Big Benjamins
Poundbury, unexpectedly, in the rain
The Exploding Concrete Inevitable. Lou Reed and the Casa da Musica
Untitled (Plastic Sack and Timber)
Berlin 1945 - The Obscene Picturesque
Interview: Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane
An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
Langlands & Bell - The House of Osama Bin Laden
Architectural Criticism gets Sharp
Venturi, Scott Brown and my love that dare not speak its name.
Douglas Coupland: Design and Fiction
Christopher Dresser at the V&A
Fugitives and Refugees' - Chuck Palahniuk
Just What is it That Makes Yesterdays Homes So Different, So Appealing?
Everything Counts - The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
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