`Build, don’t talk.” That was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s typically terse way of saying that precious theorizing is all well and good, but the art of building matters much, much more.
Still, talk does frame how architects think. And that affects how they design, which along with money and power shapes the cityscape. Even the taciturn Mies displayed a gift for gab, throwing off such aphorisms as “Less is more” and “We don’t invent a new architecture every Monday morning.”
All that is a roundabout way of getting to the subject of architecture magazines, and of stating that Chicago and the nation are worse off for what has happened lately to two highly regarded journals: Progressive Architecture, which died an ignominious death late last year; and Chicago’s Inland Architect, which is still being published but is so thin in advertising and editorial content that it belongs to the ranks of the living dead.
At their respective heights, Progressive Architecture and Inland Architect weren’t simply trade magazines or pretty picture books that fawned over favored designers, a habit that remains the norm at the other national design journals, Architectural Record of New York City and Architecture of Washington, D.C. Like all good journalism, they probed below the surface of things and found broad meaning there.
Based in Stamford, Conn., 76-year-old Progressive Architecture had introduced a hard-hitting format in 1994 that dealt forthrightly with such troubling issues as the future of the recession-battered profession of architecture. Progressive Architecture–PA, for short–was brave enough to ask: “Can This Profession Be Saved?” It did so with insightful panache, putting a picture of actor Gary Cooper, playing Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” on its cover and exploring new roles for architects to play in the post-’80s construction bust.
The magazine also didn’t pull punches in slamming such self-indulgent buildings as Peter Eisenman’s Columbus Convention Center in Ohio, whose crazily tilting masonry facades are the design world’s answer to prewashed jeans–pre-earthquaked architecture.
The roof still caved in on PA. It wasn’t making money as a result of the building slowdown that began in the late ’80s. So last December, its owner, Cleveland-based Penton Publishing, sold it to the owner of Architecture, BPI Communications of New York City. Thus began a war of survival in which the public emerged the loser.
BPI had troubles of its own because the American Institute of Architects had announced that Architecture no longer would be its official publication. As of next year, that distinction–and the thousands of guaranteed subscriptions it brings–will belong to McGraw-Hill Inc.’s Architectural Record. So BPI did what any wounded animal would do. It killed off its competitor for sustenance, eliminating PA.
For those who live in the Chicago area, the saga of Inland Architect necessarily hits closer to home. Established in 1883, the magazine made its name reporting on the rebuilding of Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871 and as a forum for such internationally renowned architects as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Its name said it all: Inland was the voice of the Midwest, more attuned to Dayton or Des Moines than to beach houses in the Hamptons. It was, in a sense, dedicated to disproving a remark once made by a New York editor–“Nothing of much importance happens between the coasts.”
That, of course, was bunk. And Inland proved it in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was run by a non-profit association formed by Chicago architect Harry Weese. With subsidies from Weese helping to pay the the bills and full-time editor Cynthia Davidson orchestrating a talented group of writers, the bimonthly publication flourished.
A typical issue, May-June 1988, weighed in at a healthy 104 pages, and carried 71 advertisements. The cover image was Helmut Jahn’s glassy blue jukebox, the NorthWestern Atrium Center. Inside were reports from St. Louis, Milwaukee and Cincinnati, plus an in-depth look at State Street by two Chicago architects, Philip Bess and Howard Decker. They wrote each column under the name “The Chicago Architectural Police,” a heading that neatly encapsulated Inland’s bare-knuckled brand of intellectual feistiness.
It was, perhaps, too good to last–or, at least, it did not stand on firm enough financial footing to weather the early ’90s construction slump that threw thousands of architects out of work. In 1990, Weese withdrew his support and the magazine had to raise money from its board, private donors and the very Chicago architectural firms whose ranks were being decimated by the downturn in commercial building. With circulation slumping to 3,500 from 4,500 and with debts reaching $150,000, Inland was sold two years ago to a Chicago-based trade publisher, Real Estate News Corp. At the time, its publisher, Steven Polydoris, said: “I saw the quality of the magazine take a nose dive. We want to bring it back up to speed.”
Quality is still lacking
Financial speed, perhaps. Editorially, Inland Architect is being run right into the ground. Polydoris proudly states that his company is the “Wal-Mart of publishing,” cranking out eight magazines with a tiny staff. It shows. In both heft and intellect, Inland Architect is a lightweight. This year’s March-April issue has a meager 26 pages and 4 advertisements. There are no letters to the editor, no book or building reviews, as there were in the old Inland. The cover story is a reprinted press release for the United States Institute for Theater Techonology Architecture Awards Program. The cover image is a music and convention hall in Lubeck, Germany, designed by a Hamburg architect. This from the design journal that bills itself as “The Midwest Magazine of the Building Arts.”
One of the worst sins a publication can commit, besides grevious errors of fact, is to become irrelevant–so little respected by its readers, so disconnected from what is important to them, that it no longer provides a meaningful forum for debate. And that is what has happened to Inland Architect. It is so little a part of the Chicago architecture community that two of the busiest design stores in town, the gift shop of the Chicago Architecture Foundation and the Prairie Avenue Bookshop, don’t carry it. Says a staff member at the gift shop: “They would sit there and no one would buy them.”
And yet, Inland Architect continues to exist. That is more than one can say for PA–a noble failure but a failure nonetheless. A publication does its readers no good if goes out of business. Polydoris insists that the magazine’s stripped-down format has enabled it to turn a profit. Inland is slowly paying off its creditors, he says, while circulation is back up to 5,000, though more than half of that is outside the Chicago area. Having kept the magazine alive financially, the publisher maintains that he is open to suggestions for reinvigorating it. He has thought about hiring a full-time editor, he says, but won’t commit to the idea. How strong is his commitment to excellence? One certainly is not encouraged when he says of his latest cover story: “You know it’s a press release, I know it’s a press release. But there are people who want to read it.”
A need for a new voice
Like nature, the marketplace abhors a vacuum. Dissatisfied with the quality of the magazine being offered them, architects, planners, critics and historians are banding together to either form or upgrade design journals of their own.
A consortium of design organizations, including the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, wants to publish a master calendar of events that would appear 10 months a year and would include critical essays like those that once appeared in Inland. A group of local academics wants to put out its own design research journal, to be published periodically. Both ventures received seed grants last month from a major patron, the Chicago-based Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The Graham also is considering a request from PA’s highly regarded former editors, John Morris Dixon and Thomas Fisher, for an electronic architecture magazine to be available on the Internet.
There are other ideas. The Chicago chapter is upgrading its monthly magazine, Focus Architecture Chicago, to include two four-color issues a year. Still, Focus’ mandate will remain promoting chapter members, not criticizing them. Meanwhile, Inland’s “Architecture Police” have been meeting for more than a year with other former contributing editors and planning a desktop-published magazine of their own.
At a time when architects in Chicago and the nation are struggling to redefine themselves, the health and well-being of the fledgling journals is critical. Designers need them today to thrash out the ideas that will shape the buildings of tomorrow. Yet now, at the very moment when dialogue is needed, there’s no adequate forum for it. It’s time to build and talk. The future of the cityscape depends on it.
