In an age when the primary vehicle for architectural thought is the twelve-pound, $85 high-gloss monograph, a new exhibit at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York reminds us that this wasn't always the case. The exhibit, "Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines," covers the early 1960's through the 1970's, when insurrection-minded architects and writers produced small, short-run magazines capturing the intellectual ferment of the time. The magazines, often wildly inventive and frequently gorgeous, imagined architecture as a progressive social force, probably the last point at which such beliefs were possible. The hand-crafted nature of the magazines also hark back to the time when design was a tactile activity. As Nicolai Ouroussoff writes, "You’re bound to leave the show with a nagging sense of what was lost as well as gained during the electronic juggernaut of the last three decades."
Ouroussoff is clearly charmed by the magazines and the iconoclastic ethos they represent. He denies feeling any nostalgia, but it's hard not to be nostalgic for a time when ideas about art and architecture mattered as much as they did then. When was the last time anyone associated with architecture was arrested, as the editors of Arquitectos de México were in 1969? The contrast between the ardent politics of the time and the starchitect system of today is striking. In 1970 ARse attacked Archigram for designing a leisure center in Monte Carlo. (Evidently the problem was that leisure was a malignant bourgeois concept.) One wonders what they would make of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, two of our most prominent cutting-edge architects, designing buildings for a phony "culture capital" project in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates funded by billions of petrodollars.
Yet, as cool as Archigram and ARse may have been, and as path breaking as their attacks on the shibboleths of Modernism appeared, one can't also help recalling the period's odd structures that haven't aged well, like the "crazy little buildings" in Japan that exasperated Arata Isozaki. And while architecture and design has certainly lost something with the advent of computer-aided design, the computer has also allowed architects to move beyond Euclidean perfection of Modernism. A 2003 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, "Non-Standard Architecture" portrayed the computer as a means to break out of the standardization that has hampered design since the Industrial Revolution. No more identical boxes, or at least that was the hope. While CAD has produced plenty of exotic blob buildings, they've also made it possible to return to more hand-crafted building practices, even if no human hands are involved in the construction. For instance, in Renzo Piano's Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church in Foggia, Italy computer-driven lasers were used to carve out uniquely-shaped stones for the same cost as identical cubes. Arguably, this is a more responsible and practical form of innovation, but at the same time, not as much fun as a skyscraper made of Swiss cheese.
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