With so many new things* piling up, I absolutely had to do a round up of some of the inaugural issues of ‘little’ magazines that, while lying in my office floor, also took part in the recent and continued revival of the archizine.

Intriguingly so, Dissegno itself spoke of how design magazines have been consciously pushing the borders of the architectural, not only into ever-new interdisciplinary connectivities or wide web platforms, but also ending up in territories that no longer pertain exclusively to architecture.

There was a time around the beginning of the 20^th century in which design, in its acception of object creation, was still the bastard offspring of architectural mastery. Now, as it somewhat scandalously seems, it is architecture that more often than not is seen under the wide and prolific umbrella of design culture.

Thus, what once was for me the quintessential compel of an event such as ExperimentaDesign – the notion that activities as far apart as graphic design and urban planning are unified under the broad cultural inheritance of the progetto – is now also the implicit drive for the editorial mission of previous Icon editor and Disegno founder Johanna Agerman Ross.

This being said, I had the intention of reviewing in this post more or less every genre represented in my small but proud collection of number one editions, from the student zine lookalike full of star contributions, such as the 2010 Block, architecture etc., back to the academic-journal-refusing-to-be-academic also full of star contributions, such as the 2003 Log.

London’s Block, architecture etc. and…                 New York-based Log.

But alas, moving to another continent has a way of being hard on your luggage selection, and so I’ve decided to focus this update on two geographically bounded magazines that appeared during last summer, one in the unlikely – or not so – outskirts of Porto, the other in no longer so classical Rome.

The first of those, Peachvelvet International, or PI.MAG, belongs to a not unpredictable trend of publications catering locally to all the resilient lovers of an enduring, softly hued architectural minimalism.

This is all about the well-respected late modern tendeza that is still creating bridges and bonds for lone, misunderstood architects in disparate locations like the Iberian peninsula and relevant sections of the islands of Japan, United Kingdom or Switzerland.

PI.MAG’s opening manifesto is naturally and wikipedically about the color “white,” which as we know nowadays comes in manifold gradations right down to pitch black. Grey is thus welcome into the mag’s velvety, impeccable pages.

And while overall blinding white is still the domain of dodgy radicals – and being that the editors are “not obsessed with white or white buildings” – the delicate, tactile palette of this zine also welcomes the faint tinges of birch or even the manly rusty orange of Corten steel.

So as to complete its eulogy of descriptive, tint neutrality, PI.MAG rounds off with a piece of criticism – yes! amazing! – that dedicates yet another diatribe of fine ironical analysis to the color “green” and its many sustainable shades.

At this point we are finally allowed to uncover that “green” is not only the new black. “Green” has also become an ideological tool that conceals the lack of architectural quality of all the buildings that refuse to be simply and naturally… white. It really makes you wonder.

Boundaries speaks of entirely dissimilar colors. And that is suddenly warmingly welcome. As you flip through the magazine, you cannot avoid the color of dirt, and the color of people, and the color of naïve attempts at happiness. And this is good, and it feels right in a time in which a politics of radical aesthetics has to substitute again for the faint aestheticizations of the nice and cute.

As stated in its inaugural editorial, the borders in this magazine are not intended to be that of “the political frontier.” However, there is a bold desire to push some edges, namely in regards to what the stances of the architectural profession have been within a “new economy.”

As a peer-reviewed magazine that gets architects, researchers, urban planners, historians and geographers together, Boundaries is precisely about not being neutral, about joining forces, about enrichening the dialogue with differing positions. It does not acritically want to just caress the well established. And that is as promising as dedicating its first issue to Africa.

Opening up to Africa’s many realities, the project reviews in Boundaries reach from cooperation to tourist operations. In either case, they recall what to me emerges as still an essential problem: how to sustain the innovative qualities of architectural research when cultural and material resources are scarce.

And this question somehow relates to a worrisome impression which has often overcome me along the last couple of years. This is the possibility that, rather than the emergent economies we’re currently looking at, Africa might indeed be the future. For the better and the worse.

In that sense, it is only logical that we start paying some serious attention to this large, often forgotten continent.

The New World. Image via satyamshot.wordpress.com.

Nope. This is only a small reminder about paradigm shifts, and changes and opportunities provided by ideological crises and stagnant realities, and the way in which architecture may these days be finally metamorphing into something completely different – as the Monty Python would surely put it.

So, this is also about the last article I’ve published in 2011, as it just came out in a great issue of MAJA, the Estonian Architectural Review. Facing the theme of architecture as event, this was ultimately a reflection on the idea of networks vs. affiliations, of which I want to give you a new year’s gift of an excerpt:

Is architecture a technical service or a cultural production? Is it both? Or is the profession actually splitting to accommodate potentially contrasting positions? Such questions illuminate how, within a heavily mediated context, social networking and cultural exchange acquire a renewed relevance. Pierre Bourdieu has classically written on how the fields of cultural production – what he, in fact, called the economic world reversed – always contain two opposed sub-fields. In contrast with a sort of extended, middlebrow production that engulfs the majority, one of these sub-fields is a restricted territory to which only a few can belong, but which actually determines the effective symbolic values at play in the whole field. Still, he considers that the two sub-fields are magnetically united by permanent transactions, including players who, by ascension or declassification, move from one sub-field to another. But what if these two sub-fields are actually splitting into two entirely different professions? What if a part of the architectural profession, namely its restricted sub-field, is detaching itself into an autonomous sphere that, although it might still inform and produce reflection on the world of construction, is no longer tied with the dimension of architecture as technical service? This would mean that a section of the profession would acquire independence as a purer form of cultural production. And would thus be ruled by the thorny, uncertain laws of culture making. Intrinsically, more than formally, this world would then be inevitably closer to the functioning of the art world – with its galleries and museums, and its biennales and events, and its collectors and markets, its media and formats, and its power games and exquisite social networks. It would be as if the Moon stopped orbiting around the Earth and turned instead to Mars. Well, beware. The Moon is already making its way to Mars.

 In Architecture, Networked Cultures and How to Make the Most of Them, MAJA #70, Tallin, December 2011

It’s only in appearance that the recently published Urban Maps is about establishing a cartography of the city. Unless, of course, one considers that the practice of mapping the city is nowadays becoming itself highly performative.

The investigation’s subtitle is eventually more enlightening: Instruments of Narrative and Interpretation in the City. Even so, the academic overtones hide the fact that this exciting read is all about grafitti and street art, film and underground flâneurs, pixadores and new modes of psychogeography – as practices that should now be taken as referentials to occupying architecture.

As my own endorsment prints in the back cover:

Fifty years ago, Kevin Lynch offered us a classical reading of ‘the image of the city’ based on a waning ideal of clear built landmarks and distinct urban signs. Now, through inspired insights and an in-depth inquiry into a vast array of contemporary urban practices, the authors of Urban Maps reveal us how the complex narratives currently converging in the appropriation and redefinition of an eroded urban space require a totally revamped cognitive mapping… From the readings of cinema to the interventions of street art, from the markings of graffiti to the identities of brandscapes, and from the wanderings of contemporary art to the fictional drives of theory, architecture is confronted with the need to review the cartography of its references when facing the ascendancy of the urban condition – and the prominence of new networked, information-augmented realities – as substituting for previous conceptions of the city.

Like the most interesting charts of new territories, Richard Brook and Nick Dunn’s publication presents us with insights into the least seen spots of the current urban condition, into the borders and hidden spaces of varied forms of intervention within the city landscape.

As an appropriate side dish, we are ultimately offered a thorough reflection on how architecture now competes for an expressive space in this sign-invaded, market-dominated, narrative-filled urbanscape.

Image by RE_MAP, Manchester School of Architecture’s design research lab

After we turn these pages and practice stories we’re left with the pertinent and resilient concern on how “a critical understanding of the evolution of art in the environment can be translated to a discourse concerning the production of architecture.” And the more we take to the streets,* the more such concerns are to overcome any remaining delusion of architecture’s conventional autonomy.

Autonomy should still be there, yes. But, if you want, in a kind of Hal Foster version in which culture practice is still able to relate to social and political reality, while it manages to sustain its ability to be critical and somewhat exempt from the demeaning effects of external (and peer) pressure.

After one or two posts on this, the event impels me to finally announce here that the international open call for Performance Architecture within the 2012 European Capital of Culture is now up and about, ready to be propagated like a benign virus to whoever might feel challenged to set out ideas, programs and architectural concepts that may win the streets back to the people.*

This open call for five temporary urban interventions in the city of Guimarães will offer kick-start prizes of 12.000€ to concepts that are able to promote the appropriation (or occupation?) of controversial public spaces by city inhabitants. Proposals are to be submitted online until January 6th 2012.

Implying that anyone who wants to contribute to the reconstruction of current notions of public space has to somehow become a full cultural producer, the competition invites multidisciplinary teams of artists, architects, designers, etc., to send out ideas that can reactivate performance strategies and simultaneously (re)invent participative architectures in the urban realm.

A one-day seminar on the theme will follow on the 25^th February 2012, involving members of the juri Santiago Cirugeda, Didier Fiuza Faustino, A77, Raumlabor, and Office for Subversive Architecture, inbetween other special guests. At that occasion, the five lucky winners – who may be entitled to a one month residency in situ – will also be publicly announced, together with further 25 proposals selected for a small exhibition and catalogue.

“13.

Translator Richard Howard writing on Roland Barthes reminds us of the latter’s fierce determination to assert “the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge.” Barthes, himself, evoked the writerly bliss as that which “unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions,” a specific event that “brings a crisis to his relation with language.” Meanwhile, it sounds like architecture only recently has come to be seen as a form of knowledge, a language that is related to something more than just erecting buildings. Now that its erogenous zones have been reallocated, maybe the bliss of writing (and reading) on architectural matters can be about something else. It may now be about merrily upturning our liaison to architecture’s very foundations, instead of further tying us down to its fundamentalisms, its recurring institutional incarcerations, its plain unfortunate downturns.”

in “On Experimental Architectural Writing and Its Media”

This is one of sixteen sections in a text I have recently contributed to the catalogue of the exciting Archizines exhibition, opening this Friday November 4th at the Architectural Association, in London.

While Beyond was chosen as one of the 60 independent architectural magazines on show, Elias Redstone was also so kind as to challenge me to dwell on “why it is again critically imperative for creative, fictional and personal narratives to be inventive in regards to architectural discourse and practice” – as related to media where this is still possible, as against the general (main)streamlining of culture.

The resulting exploration was an opportunity to finally weave together some wandering ideas on the pleasures of writing and reading architecture, especially after my participation in the On Experimental Writing panel debate, at the CCA, back  in February. (The podcast is still available on that link).

Beyond criticism, press releases and other boring reports on what’s up in the world of architecture, I specially wanted to focus on how writing can and should be a practice on its own terms, one that nonetheless only accomplishes itself when it reaches the reader through what Barthes appropriately called bliss.

Being an avid, curious reader, I tend to consider any text that fails to sustain my attention simply badly written. Fiction itself is about the precise technique with which one delivers a story, more than about the inventiveness of the narrated facts. Good writing is one that captures its reader through both idea and form.

This being said, there is a considerable difference in between the baroque complexity of one Pierre Bourdieu – in which the sheer strength of the ideas surmounts a decided, purposeful difficulty imposed on his readers as a sort of initiation rite – and someone whose thoughts are simply insipid and unclear.

Texts must want to communicate. They must want to communicate ideas, or emotions, or even straightforward information. In an age of information surplus, texts that lack such inner, initial desire, become merely superfluous. Vain. And the same should be said of any form of communication, architecture included.

Apart from the surrealistic memento, what did I learn from Den Haag, one could ask? Visiting the administrative capital of the supposed richest country in Europe always ought to taught you something. So, let me briefly debrief you.

Unfortunately, and first of all, I didn’t learn what Luomo is up to these days. Given the sudden need to include a trip to Paris inside my trip to Den Haag, I ended up arriving quite late for my one-nighter in Den Haag.

Due to a badly signed, unfinished highway I  actually got lost in the port of Antwerpen, had to ask directions from a Polish truck driver in a deserted gas station… and payed a toll on it too.

Nevertheless, because of the happenstance, I did see the new Rotterdam skyline, did my beauty sleep and kept my usual 6am schedule, something highly improbable if I had attended Todays Festival exciting nighttime programme.

Thus I lost both the dark side and the cultural plus Den Haag might have offered and had only what they call the city’s tunnel vision. In this instance, you are lucky if you have half an hour to walk up and down a highly commercial high street that could belong anywhere in small-town Europe. Same brands, same suburban feel.

No Trust No City © Designboys, via Designboys.

Ultimately, I did do my thing and learned that Raumlabor’s inflatable BXL at the festival grounds hadn’t the most perfect acoustics in the world. Still, it allowed for a decent, intimate conversation, especially if you would sit on the floor of the Ant Farm inspired bubble in a circle like Indians did ages ago. By then, however, you could imagine a neo-hippie conspiration was taking place. Which would sound* perfectly ridiculous, anyway. Even in the present circumstance.

Secondly, I also learned that Metropolis M magazine carried eloquent protest editorials in a moment in which severe budget cuts are undermining the acknowledged potential of Dutch intelligence.

If no other impression comes to mind concerning the whole of Europe at this moment in time, such protests should at least be read as generous warnings regarding the destruction of a nice funding system.

This grant system was what eventually allowed for successful Dutch cultural exports in areas such as graphic design, product design, fashion, and architecture. Even I was twice the benefiary of that system, although I’m positively no flying Dutchman. Its demise illustrates the bigger picture and a gloomier outcome for what is touristy Europe’s major asset: its culture.

Finally, some friends would also ask what did I learn from my brisk visit to Paris? The only thing I can reveal is that I had a not too bright glimpse of her becoming a second Lagos. As fascinating as the African megalopolis, certainly more attractive to the naked eye, Paris felt as irrational to use in a car. Unless, of course, this was carefully planned in view of a fictional scenario in which the city officials are preparing to ban cars totally and forever.

Another Boring Postcard, #31 (Paris), hacked image via Stephy’s in Paris

Crossing Paris by car reminded me of a huge traffic jam I was once in, in Morocco. On a holiday trip, cast against a rural landscape, the thing felt delicious and exotic. In compact Paris, slowly zooming in and out of the city centre felt only stressful and shocking. Even if on Friday everybody is frantic to escape the city, there were behaviours and time loss rates I would expect in places like Luanda. But then, Angola’s capital is now the most expensive city in the world.

Which reminds me of a time when the most expensive cities in the world were also the most attractive to live in. Now, particularly in Europe, it seems like the once expensive are turning into a bad Mad Max version of an unwanted future. Considering its undesirable political, social costs, what was once highly priced is now indeed becoming strangely unappealing.

Given this curious inversion, I can only doubt if we are at a period when, of all things, “the luxury retail store has become a crucial forum for architecture,” as Mohsen Mostafavi has  recently sold it ouhmm… I mean, put forward.

Pondering such epicurean statements from the dean of one of the most acclaimed architecture schools, should we be still surprised or sad when claims regularly have it that “architects are not the solution to urbanisation“?

As those who have actually once read books will remember, Jorge Luis Borges unsettled the notion of taxonomy in an eccentric tale called “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” The magazines that I hold here would precisely deserve something like the absurd categories Borges made up in his biblio-zoological incursion.

Toilet Paper, for a start, is quite an odd one. An artist’s project published by Maurizion Cattelan and Pier Paolo Ferrari since June 2010, it is already on its 8^th issue in two years, which is something remarkable given its surrealistic contents.

Entirerly composed by a juxtaposition of highly narrative, vaguely retro-looking images Toilet Paper is intellectual porn at its provocative best. Self-proclaimed a “new generation magazine”, it is not clear if it should be filed under “ post-Warholian sick glam,” “anthropological studies” or simply “visual culture.”

A more orthodox, but similarly almost random collection of artist visuals appeared on the first issue of Toronto-based Hunter and Cook back in 2008.

And even if this magnificently named mag falls more typically under the category of the “art magazine”, the stuff in it is still untypical enough for you to be temporarily unsure if you’re flipping through a trash metal fanzine, a photo souvenir album or an alternative comic revue.

As for the equally Canadian Victor, even if it originated from a bunch of graphic design students, its omnivorous nature also makes it pretty undefineable.

Victor is part of a publication triumvirate that is centered in fictional characters, including issues dedicated to Bruno and Nadia. Following the wanderings and psychological landscape of such characters it goes into pretty anything, from weird everyday stories to favorite records, from conversations and messaging with friends and strangers to, above all, great illustration work.

Staying within the category of “magazines with person’s names” let me also introduce you to handsome Sebastian. Its cover says it all: just a first name – a supposed alter ego – and a slightly distorted, disturbing male figure.

Sebastian appeared in London in 2011 and while it promised to show up twice a year to talk about style and culture, it hasn’t yet produced any descendancy.

Meanwhile, its graceful and varied tour debut includes a very personal visit to a tainted  New York Architecture and interviews with remarkable figures like gallerist Maureen Paley, “artisan purist” Geoffrey B Small and delicious “expressionist cooks” Lily Vanilli and Margot Henderson.

Another beautiful tiny magazine full with amazing characters and personas is the smartly called Afterzine. Sonic Thurston Moore, pop* guru Peter Saville and classic Henry David Thoreau were my few previous acquaintances, which means Afterzine became for me another feast of the unfamiliar.

Here, the variety goes from essays and fictions to photography and graphics, and from light waves and roundographs to book spines and –free food, all however connected by the notion of “negative space” and the affectionate curatorial direction of Vanity Fair editor Hamish Robertson.

The fact that more and more magazines are now curated by… – just remember the pioneer A Magazine Curated By… – naturally brings very individual idiosyncrasies into this particular media, making zines prone to quite subjective ravings and juxtapositions.

In the case of Science Poems, the articulation of science and art, i.e. the lasting dichotomy of C. P. Snow on the two cultures, but also the ghostly presence of science fiction as role model, leads to a most unsual publication, especially considering  it is curated by a collective with a design background.

Is it a mag? Is it a numbered book? Is it a catalogue? No, it’s Science Poems!…

The content packed in this 144 pages by OK Do‘s Anni Puolakka and Jenna Sutella, include anything from interviews with philosophers of science, curators, artists and designers to tales on heavenly bodies, brain visions, DNA junk, life-breeding meteorites, volcanic eruptions or big-bang machines, always with the bold intent to “avoid traditional categories or disciplinary boundaries.”

In the end, not only the format of the magazine has become elastic enough to accommodate the most extreme variations – from serial bookazines to artist experiences, from one-off objects to virtual catalogues – but this is also a media that allows for the unclassifiableness and wild diversity of the world to come at the reach of one’s hands in compact form.

This is, alas, part of the diffuse, abbondant phenomena that may today be preparing us for a dramatic post-oil scenario. The current media wealth, of which magazines are only a small example, ultimately allows anyone to gather relevant information and worldviews without necessarily having to be physically present in what used to be the traditional centres of knowledge and culture diffusion.

For the good part of an expanding Western Modern culture, being outside the centre would seem like a condemnation to locality and provincialism. Now sometimes feels as if the assumed centres of cultural production are those blind to the profusion of what’s going on.* (Even if the centre is always recruiting.)

One of the uncertain advantages of our networked, media societies lies precisely in the fact that connectivity makes it quite indifferent where you may presently be rooted. Rather, it’s all about where and how your senses are really pluggin’ in.

This is the concept I’ve presented to ExperimentaDesign when invited to host one of their 2011 OpenTalks. With talk hosts such as curators Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Zoe Ryan, this promises to be one of the biennial’s Opening Week highlights, taking place as from today at 11am  in another amazingly empty heritage building in Lisbon’s historical core, until recently the home to the Boa Hora Law-Court.

.. At Trial in Boa-Hora Court, 1980. Via Memoriando.

So, this is the weird setting in which tomorrow at 11am invited ladies Alexandra Lange, architecture critic at the Design Observer, Folke Koebberling, from Koebberling & Kaltwasser, and Gretchen Mokry, from Architecture for Humanity will take architecture culture to martial enquiry…

The issue here is not really if buildings and shelter are useful, which they obviously are, but more if we may dismiss architecture thinking and its (dis)contents as distant and useless – as so many seem to assume too quickly.

For one, I attended the International Federation for Housing and Planning 55^th World Congress to be in a panel that summarized some reflections from the potentially ongoing Another Urban Future think tank.

While I was at it, I felt overused buzzwords like sustainability were still fully around, performing as ideological clutches – as political, marketing tools – for planner corporations and institutional decision-makers. But the fact that we’ve more or less globally committed to implement sustainable processes, lower carbon-emission and greener cities in the near future is bringing new notions to the agenda, with retrofitting positively being my favorite.

As William Gibson has just put it in terms of fictional technique, retrofitting is all about reverse-engineering exiting cities – including what we call slums, favelas or shadow towns – so as to reduce the consumption of vanishing resources. What in other times we would call survival. And what we now strangely label as business opportunities.

To the distaste of some sections of our pragmatic, Western-oriented audience, the panel proposed as an alternative that we should stress and face up to notions such as contextual complexity, intense livability and community-oriented bottom up approaches, being that these are merely considered as conceptual apparatuses to help cities grow better. Because, as one knows, many of them will grow independently of any planning…

Those ideas were also convened with the precise intention of defying dodgy political habits and unadventurous  top-down behaviours. The discussion was a means of presenting problems, more than ready-made answers. And, in my case, it served to again call to mind the oddly forgotten, and yet overwhelming global dilemmas posed by emergent megalopolises, right as we speak.

On my way in to Estonia’s capital, I had seen the last of four documentaries included in the very interesting Cities on Speed series, and was driven to acknowledge that the current growth of megacities defies both traditional  and modern planning strategies. And thus we have to look at things very differently if indeed we – all of us – want to prevent scenarios like those of Cairo slowly but surely choking on its own garbage.

Garbage City, Cairo, via Inhabitat.

Following on the perception that telecommunications have already outcomed long-established needs for conventional infrastructure, maybe developing compact metropolises have to step directly onto robotized garbage collection, drilling new tunnels or retrofitting abandoned subterranean sewage systems so as to implement trash conveyer belts or computorised junk vacuum systems that can directly receive, select and process human debris into energy production.

Likewise, any other notion of traditional, heavy infrastructure probably has to be re-imagined so as to be substituted for cheaper, self-maintaining urban systems that recur to smart combinations of hi- and lo-tech, while fundamentally catering for the participation and involvment of local communities.

In face of such challenges, while our panel’s invitation to think out of the box might have been somewhat philosophical in tone, it slightly worried me that thinking – and namely anticipating the broader consequences of current decision-making – wasn’t on the memos of those who are indeed in charge of responding to the problems of contemporary cities.

The man whose head in fact exploded captured the meager and eager attention of local and regional sensationalist tabloids in the early eighties. He was an unbeknownst artist, until he alleged that he had been a minimalist, a conceptualist and a pop artist, all simultaneously, and before their due time. His wonderful and frightening story gained him a place in the history of alternative pop music around 1982. As the song that immortalized him went, “the scriptwriter would follow him around, the soap opera writer would follow him around, and use his jewels for t.v. prime time.” (more…)

As GMG House is enjoying its second breadth of international appearances and is popping up in magazines across the globe, I guess it’s about time to add it to this blog’s architecture archive, along with the short story I wrote to go with it.

GMG House © Fernando Guerra, FG+SG Architectural Photography.

I don’t refer often to my own architecture practice in this space. That’s probably because I don’t do that much architecture. Maybe I build one project every two years. But when I do, I do it with extreme pleasure and hoping that this bliss will pass onto others, and preferably into their own lives. Indeed this may illustrate my lazy maxim that is better do do less, but to a maximum impact.

After it launched in Mark and Domus in May and was published online at Design Milk, the house’s images have literally tumblered around like arsoning, thus introducing me to the wonderful and frightening world of microblogging. In this rentrée, though, more people can now peruse through GMG House in print.

See GMG house in Frame #82, Icon #100, Azure 09.11, AIT 7/8.2011, MD 9.11…

Media success, however, does not necessary equal new clients. And that has the fortunate outcome of still allowing me to delightfully wander in between 2 or 3 different activities that are essential to my intellectual wellbeing. One practice, after all, keeps my mind off the other. And all of them inform each other.