Page 209 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

of littleness” in big magazines, which are a crucial part of this phenomenon and include the Casabella of Alessandro Mendini (1970-76), the Bau of Hans Hollein, Günter Feurstein and Walter Pichler (1965-70), the Domus of Gio Ponti in the 1970s, Aujourd’hui: Art et architecture of André Bloc, etc. If Margaret Anderson wanted the big publications to read the little ones, here the logic of the little magazines had literally been absorbed into the big magazines, like a Trojan horse, and would ultimately leak out across the wider landscape.
There has been some kind of amnesia about this exuberant moment. Even the protagonists, the editors and architects involved in the production of these magazines seem to have forgotten how amazing, dense and explosive that moment was. While often referred to in passing, the little magazines were soon scattered in libraries, archives, and private collections as the discourse moved on. Bringing them back to light today exposes both the key arguments of that time, but also the crucial role played by medium that fostered and disseminated these polemical positions. As the discourse today is absorbing a whole wave of ephemeral communication systems, this earlier shift of technology suddenly snaps into focus.
What made this explosion possible? The rise of new and low-cost printing technologies such as portable mimeograph machines and offset lithography in the early 1960s was of crucial importance. Not only did these technologies make printing accessible to more people, they enabled entirely different methods for assembling publications. The page could now be prepared on the drawing board or the kitchen table rather than at the compositors print-bed. In this new informal space architects could clip and recombine materials from a variety of sources, and experiment with the effects of juxtaposition and scaling, the mobility of transfer lettering, the properties of lithographic color, etc. In fact, there is a relation between the production of architectural concepts in those years and the different production techniques used to create the publications themselves. Not by chance, Clip Kit takes its name and unique format from the concept of “Clip-on architecture” that it promoted in its pages, having picked up the concept from Banham’s reading of Archigram. Likewise the pop-up technique of the Archigram Zoom issue unconsciously communicates their polemic for instant architecture—medium and message inseparable.
These innovative and energetic publications helped form a global network of exchange amongst students and architects, but also between architecture and other disciplines. Interconnections and shared obsessions between different magazines built a formidable network of little publications collaborating as a single intelligent organism testing all the limits of architecture. Everything but architecture in the conventional sense of a building or an architect in the conventional sense. Look at the covers. You rarely see the image of a building or the face of an architect. In the moment in which Hollein famously claimed that “Everything is Architecture” everything but architecture is splashed across the covers of radical magazines in an orgy of intense and sophisticated graphic design, a collaborative utopia acting as an incubator of new ways of thinking and a key arena in which the emerging problems facing architectural production could be debated.
LITTLE MAGAzINES: PORTABLE UTOPIA BEATRIz COLOMINA 209