Are architectural magazines and books still today primary tools for expressing canons, codes and positions? If not, are there any new tools today? Make a new architectural magazine or a new architectural “code-book” is still a militant architect's dream? Does it make sense today to represent a broader discourse on the world with an architectural writing? For the architect and architecture, today, perhaps it is worthwhile to understand whether publishing still represents, mainly, the way to establish a direct connection between the detail of his work and an “context” of general legitimation of a disciplinary, cultural and political nature. Just over a year ago, in New York, Bruce Mau, in a speech at The World Around summit entitled “Redesigning everything: a new era of a massive change”, first described the profound transformation we face and then explained why everything will have to be redesigned. Bruce Mau, through “grammatical” images, simply recounted his work with communication and media, described his recent interests on “Massive Change”, as well as his ideas contained in his latest book “MC24 - Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in your Life and Work”, or 24 global, generous, and galvanizing principles to overhaul the way we think and to inspire massive change. But perhaps the most interesting concept that Bruce Mau said about militant architects is found in an interview he gave to the magazine «Azure» on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of that code-book, which is “S, M, L, XL”, signed with Rem Koolhaas. In fact, when asked if architects today still needed to create a (linguistic) leadership like that of OMA + Rem Koolhaas of the last century, he replies: «What’s really interesting is that architects were the first to think this way - they were way ahead. The first to think holistically about designing the way we live. But when it became a profession, they did so much work to police the boundary of architecture that instead of just keeping other people out, they kept the architects in. Architects […] should be designing education. All of the great challenges we have. We need the synthesis practice of architecture. The complex synthesis that architects do is the currency of our time. It's the most challenging thing to produce. Architects know how to do it, but they keep it inside of that fence […] » (Mau, 2015).
Some thoughts on architectural writing in today’s world
Ettore Vadini
2023-01-01
Abstract
Are architectural magazines and books still today primary tools for expressing canons, codes and positions? If not, are there any new tools today? Make a new architectural magazine or a new architectural “code-book” is still a militant architect's dream? Does it make sense today to represent a broader discourse on the world with an architectural writing? For the architect and architecture, today, perhaps it is worthwhile to understand whether publishing still represents, mainly, the way to establish a direct connection between the detail of his work and an “context” of general legitimation of a disciplinary, cultural and political nature. Just over a year ago, in New York, Bruce Mau, in a speech at The World Around summit entitled “Redesigning everything: a new era of a massive change”, first described the profound transformation we face and then explained why everything will have to be redesigned. Bruce Mau, through “grammatical” images, simply recounted his work with communication and media, described his recent interests on “Massive Change”, as well as his ideas contained in his latest book “MC24 - Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in your Life and Work”, or 24 global, generous, and galvanizing principles to overhaul the way we think and to inspire massive change. But perhaps the most interesting concept that Bruce Mau said about militant architects is found in an interview he gave to the magazine «Azure» on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of that code-book, which is “S, M, L, XL”, signed with Rem Koolhaas. In fact, when asked if architects today still needed to create a (linguistic) leadership like that of OMA + Rem Koolhaas of the last century, he replies: «What’s really interesting is that architects were the first to think this way - they were way ahead. The first to think holistically about designing the way we live. But when it became a profession, they did so much work to police the boundary of architecture that instead of just keeping other people out, they kept the architects in. Architects […] should be designing education. All of the great challenges we have. We need the synthesis practice of architecture. The complex synthesis that architects do is the currency of our time. It's the most challenging thing to produce. Architects know how to do it, but they keep it inside of that fence […] » (Mau, 2015).I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
