MAGAZINE AS MONSTER: “It has been called exhausting, maddening and problematic. Paradoxically the publication is so unusual that it demands to be judged, but at the same time it is too unfamiliar for anyone to be able to deliver a final verdict.”
By EMILY KING

The Dutch architecture magazine Archis has been attracting a lot of attention of late. Most of it very positive, but even praise for the magazine is delivered in a slightly equivocal tone. It has been called exhausting, maddening and problematic. Paradoxically the publication is so unusual that it demands to be judged, but at the same time it is too unfamiliar for anyone to be able to deliver a final verdict. In an article about the 2001 redesign of the magazine, the designer and writer Stuart Bailey likened it to two different monsters, the first Frankenstein and the second Dracula. Bailey’s general idea is that the magazine’s design is aggressive to the point of brutishness, but his specific point is that it is an unlikely amalgam of different parts. The question raised by Bailey’s dual analogy is whether Archis is more of a Dracula or a Frankenstein. Is it a creature like Bram Stoker’s, one that sucks sustenance from its victims and leaves them permanently altered in character? Or is it more like Mary Shelley’s sad animal collage, an uncomfortable collation of various parts? Unsurprisingly the answer is a bit of both. Archis slurps up the design tics of other magazines in a way that renders the originals a little lifeless, but its appetite is such that the results are less akin to a slick black count than an unwieldy beast.

Perusing Archis is never an easy matter. The experience of looking at a contemporary magazine and experiencing it as a blur of words and pictures with no underlying structure is not that unusual, but what sets Archis apart is that feeling doesn’t fade. However diligent you are, the magazine never resolves into a predictable sequence of columns, features and reviews; its unstable jumble of graphic and editorial styles denies all readerly comfort and complacency. Sure, there are repeated devices, such as the diagonal slash of the filing box that marks the opening of some of the magazine’s sections, or the perforated slip at the bottom of each page, a motif suggestive of interaction, but repetition does not always promote a system. Although these devices might appear to be signposts, anyone trying to follow them would soon feel lost.

Archis is the work of Maureen Mooren and Daniel van der Velden, a pair of Dutch designers who have acquired a reputation for picking apart the premises of graphic design and building formats from unlikely, but intelligent, sets of parts. The concept that underlies Archis concerns the conventional storage and relay of architectural information. This idea is played out in the magazine in two ways. Firstly there is the continuing theme of categorization explored through the file-box openers and through a naming scheme akin to that of electronic storage systems – A.-Res., A.-Dos, etc. And secondly, there are the explicit quotations from other architecture and style magazines. Expressed like that, this second idea might sound tame, but on the pages of the magazine it is anything but. Veering between Flash Art and Domus to Vogue and beyond, all in a single issue, Archis can be a queasy ride for the print literate.

Archis’s various formats are selected for their relation to content, for example a piece of writing that is intent on beautifying architecture will be delivered Domus fashion and reviews come in the shape of Flash Art. Archis’s editor Ole Bauman calls this graphic vocabulary a “treasury of magazines” and Mooren and Van der Velden argue that the publication “attempts to be many magazines at the same time,” but I can’t help feeling that there is something disingenuous about both these characterizations. Archis’s relationship to its source material is much more aggressive than either its editor or its designers suggest. That said, these magazines can’t be smarting too much because there is a rumor that, under its new editor Stefano Boeri, Domus plans to develop along Archis lines. It is a strange world in which the “anti-Domus” (Rem Koolhaas’s description of Archis) becomes a model for the real thing.

Alongside Archis’s concept-driven design strategies, the magazine carries another layer of graphic noise that Mooren and Van der Velden describe as “information painting.” This tends to take the form of sustained visual essays or unlikely visual associations. The aim of this “visual poetry” is the creation of a “total merger between form and content.” Archis is sometimes accused of putting a distance between itself and its subject. For example, the New York designer Michael Rock argued that the magazine’s “use of found typographic style” was a means of  “absolving the need for any subjectivity, that is eliminating the designers’ presumed responsibility to create distinct unique identity.” Of course Rock is right that Archis’s strategies open a gap between the designers’ intentions and the forms that they create, but his overall judgment fails to take account of the Mooren and Van der Velden’s embrace of graphic risk. As they put it themselves, the magazine “makes no use of understatement.”

Editor Bauman has been on the redesign from the beginning and there is a happy confluence between his writing style and Mooren and Van der Velden’s visual games. Bauman’s characteristic editorial strategy involves launching into a run of spectacular pronouncements, each one outdoing the last, and then, atop this quivering theoretical edifice, balancing the question “What has all this got to do with architecture?” It is an exhilarating form of argument and much of the sense of what follows, words and pictures, relies on these opening pieces. Archis is often criticized for being too akin to an “international style magazine,” but Bauman’s editorial energy belies that judgment. Only the laziest of readers could miss the magazine’s substance. Unfortunately, however, the other writers do not fare so well. Their texts tend to be cast in the role of the straightman, or else they seem to be trying a little too hard. All in all, it arouses the suspicion that Bauman has created a monster that only he can handle.

Looking at the current Archis it is hard to imagine that the publication was once a conventional, professionally focused architecture magazine. The road between Archis’s past and its present is not well traveled and the magazine’s history is particularly unusual. The title was launched in 1986, but the magazine had been around for twenty years before that in the guise of Wonen TABK, which itself was an amalgamation of two already long running titles Goed Wonen and Het Katholiek Bouwblad. Both in existence since the 1930s, Goed Wonen, or Good Living, was a publication advising workers how to live and the Katholiek Bouwblad, or the Catholic Building Journal, was a professional journal associated with the early 20^th-century Dutch emancipatory tradition. In the post-war period Dutch society went through a process of secularization and the respective ideologies of these two journals became closely allied under the broad banner of socialism. The complex mass of ideological branches that had been characteristic of Dutch society resolved into comprehensive Left and Right channels, a development that brought the Netherlands in line with general trends in global politics. The merger of the magazines in 1965 is emblematic of this widespread confluence of social and political thought.

In the mid-1980s Archis was edited by Hans Van Dijk and designed by Herman de Vries. It was published only in Dutch and tended to run articles on the major architectural projects of the day alongside those dealing with historical or public-architecture themes. Architectural giants such as Mies van der Rohe received extensive coverage, as did design endeavors such as new schools or factories. From a contemporary perspective the lack of attention to private housing or commercial spaces such as shops and restaurants is striking (one exception being an article on Nigel Coates’s popularly oriented Nato group in Archis 7/1986). Typeset largely in Gill Sans, arranged in a dense grid and using little color, the mood of the magazine is decidedly earnest. From the start, the subtitle of Archis was Architectuur, Stedebouw, and Beeldende Kunst (Architecture, Urbanism, and the Visual Arts). As this suggests the magazine did have a multidisciplinary agenda, but in the first decade of existence, art and architecture were kept firmly in their separate compartments. Art is framed as something that architects ought to know about, but need not engage with.

As the decade wore on a little of what is generally considered to be an ’80s sensibility crept into the magazine. The grid loosened up, more color seeped in and there is even a feature on the ultimate 1980s’ building, Arquitectonica’s Miami Atlantis, a building known for its architecturally framed palm tree and its appearance in the opening credits of Miami Vice. By the time Geert Bekaert took over as editor in 1990, Archis had a remit quite similar to that of the London publication Blueprint, and in 1993 the magazine took a step further in conforming to an international agenda by becoming bilingual Dutch/English. In the editorial of the first bilingual issue, Bekaert proclaimed that Archis “had crossed the language barrier” and could “now take part in the free movement of ideas.” This piece was written against the background of the early 1990s economic downturn and its overall theme is the need for enquiry in an age of uncertainty.

Archis’s move toward bilingualism posed a challenge in terms of its design. In a brief article on the new format Herman de Vries warned against the dangers of simply turning the magazine into “a parrot in a body stocking,” by which he meant a magazine that sits easily on the international news stands, but whose form and content are not in synch. The upshot was a fairly restrained formula in which Dutch, set in wide columns of Plantijn, was given the upper hand over English, set narrow in Gill Sans. The writing of the magazine (now accessible to me!) consists largely of intelligent but institutionally focused coverage of major projects peppered with argumentative editorials on issues such as government funding or international architecture prizes.

And so things went on, until the editorship changed in 1997. Calling his first editorial “towards 2000 with Archis,” the newly appointed Ole Bauman expounded the principles of dynamism, both cultural and architectural, and of interdisciplinarity. He promised to pay as much attention to the circumstances of architecture as the buildings and he altered the magazine’s subtitle to the “architecture, the city, and visual culture,” declaring these categories more fluid than the former “architecture, urbanism, and visual arts.” The visual ramifications of this change were immediate. Images atop images, text set in free-floating colored boxes and overlapping type all added up to an appearance suggestive of motion and interference.

So far, not so unusual, but the next major event in Archis’s history was prompted by events beyond the magazine’s control and provides the twist to the tale. Since its launch in 1986, the magazine had been published by Elsevier and the editorial staff had been employees of the Netherlands Architectural Institute (the NAI). This situation remained stable until 2000, when Elsevier changed its focus to business-oriented publications and jettisoned the magazine. The NAI did not have the resources to publish Archis independently and for a while it looked as if it were going to fold. Questions about the future of the magazine were raised in the Dutch parliament. State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science Riek van der Ploeg was petitioned to support Archis on the grounds of its “rich tradition.” To anyone who doesn’t live in the Netherlands the whole affair seems fairly extraordinary.

The magazine’s salvation came in the form of Artimo, a publishing outfit devoted to the niche market for experimental art and design books. With their support and a certain amount of government funding, Archis was in a position to relaunch, celebrating its survival with some major changes. Bauman instigated a competitive design pitch, which was won, of course, by Mooren and Van der Velden with their proposal to stir the design and editorial into the rich stew of its current incarnation. At the same point the magazine evolved from bilingualism into two separate language streams and it reined in its publication from monthly to six times a years. These latest developments have changed the character of the magazine significantly. Where Archis’s evolution from Wonen TABK and its subsequent bilingualism were all about the pursuit of a broad international audience, its new appearance targets the smallest of possible readerships, but one that is spread thinly across the globe. The use of English is no longer about appealing to a mass, but now functions as a means of communicating with a tiny, but thoroughly international clique.

In the editorial of Archis 1/2004, Bauman summed up the function of the magazine with the question “Why architecture?” Claiming that there were obvious markets for the more conventional questions “Who?” “What?” and “How?” he outlined a less predictable future for “Why?”:

“But is there a market for the question: Why? Is there a market for complicated and confrontational answers? One thing is certain: if you count up everyone who in spite of everything continues to ask why, there definitely is a market there. But it cannot be translated into the terms of a consistent target group, cannot be traced back to a professional niche, nor to a clearly definable market segment.”

Bauman’s intention is to pursue his audience through web projects and live events. In 2002 Stuart Bailey described Archis as “stalking its true audience;” two years later that hunt for readership has become more active.

The first six issues of the relaunched Archis were fronted by the incomplete statement “Archis is.” The idea was that readers would fill in the blank, making the identity of the magazine a matter of subjective choice. Alongside this open-ended statement, the publication was packed with activity pages, invitations to write in, tear off, and send back. Bauman describes it as a “to-do” magazine for adults. More recently, however, Archis has been completing its cover statement (“Archis is Paranoid,” “Archis is Raw,” “Archis is Open Source,” etc.) and inviting audience participation not only through perforated pages but also through talks and workshops. This latter strategy strikes me as riskier and more relevant. Archis’s former embrace of subjectivity had begun to look like a means of skirting responsibility. That said, Bauman continues to create a distance between himself and his editorial themes by describing each issue as a character. Diffidence is a habit that dies hard.

It is impossible not to have slightly ambivalent feelings about Archis. It does not seek approval and it refuses to make things easy, either for its readers, or, I suspect, for its writers. Mooren and Van der Velden describe it as the “physical embodiment of the debate,” so its hardly surprising that a lot of us find ourselves in argument with it. A more serious criticism of Archis is that it is something of a vehicle for its triumvirate of stars, Bauman, Mooren and Van der Velden. But even as I make this complaint, I am aware that it is too predictable, the outcome of a checkbox form of design criticism (Does the container allow the content an independent voice? Tick). Once the magazine is in your hands, it appears sufficiently fearless, inventive, and willful to sweep away protest in a tide of content-driven graphic noise and stirring editorial rhetoric. Archis is a publication that always does more than enough, and for that alone it deserves to thrive.