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LITTLE MAGAzINES: PORTABLE UTOPIA BEATRIz COLOMINA
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Mary Banham. Only later did the loose group of young architects (Peter Cook, Mike Webb, Dennis Crompton, Ron Herron and David Greene) call themselves Archigram, after their magazine, as in tele-gram, architecture as a communication system.
During the 1960s and 1970s there was an explosion of architectural little magazines which instigated a radical transformation in architectural culture. You can argue that during this period little magazines —more than buildings— were again the site of innovation and debate in architecture. Banham could hardly contain his excitement. In an article entitled “Zoom Wave Hits Architecture” of 1966, he throws away any scholarly restraint to absorb the syncopated rhythms of the new magazines in a kind of Futurist ecstasy:
Wham! Zoom! Zing! Rave!—and it’s 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 are—typically—rhetorical, with-it moralistic, miss-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 specially the Law of Gravity) were differently organized.4
If little magazines drove the historical avant-garde of the 1920s, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a rebirth and a transformation of the little magazine. New kinds of experimental publications acted as the engine for the period, generating an astonishing variety and intensity of work. In recent years there has been a huge interest in the experimental architecture of this time, from Archigram, the Metabolists, Antfarm, Superstudio, Archizoom, Haus Ruker Co, etc. dubbed “Radical Architecture” by Germano Celant in 19725. But the little magazines that were the real engine of that revolution have been for the most part neglected.
The term “little magazine” is an Anglosaxon term first used to describe small avant-garde literary publications, such as
4 Reyner Banham. Zoom Wave Hits Architecture in Arts
in Society, Vol 7, no. 179, p. 21,
3 March 1966.
5 Germano Celant, “Radical Architecture”. Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Achievements and problems
of Italian design. New
York: Catalogue of exhibition at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 1972, pp. 380-387.