Humpty Dumpty Sat On a Wall
Just as large firms continue to buy smaller firms, the architectural magazines have undergone mergers and acquisitions to the point where one has most of the advertising dollars. And just as tiny, boutique firms have arisen to meet the specialized needs of clients, new media keep emerging in the architectural press to address particular readers or markets.
This simultaneous consolidation and fragmentation may seem paradoxical, but it really represents two sides of the same phenomenon: deregulation. We live in an era of “economic fundamentalism,” as the economist Jane Kelsey put it, dominated by a belief in the self-correcting and self-regulating nature of markets. And, as with all fundamentalist beliefs, this one leads to extremes: in the case of the architectural press, extreme size on one hand and extreme specialization on the other. Like Humpty Dumpty, one big egg sits on top of the wall, dominating the market, while at the base of the wall there exists a growing number of pieces to the architectural press, each of which struggles in its own way.
Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall
One of the great falls in the architectural media occurred some eight years ago, when Progressive Architecture (P/A) was pushed into closure after 75 years of operation. Before 1995, the three major American architectural magazines—Architecture, Architectural Record, and Progressive Architecture—existed in equilibrium, with each about the same size and each occupying its own editorial niche. Architecture magazine, formerly the AIA Journal, had been the Institute’s magazine for decades, but faced with severe financial problems of its own making, the AIA decided to renegotiate its magazine contract. Upon receipt of a substantial payment from McGraw-Hill, the AIA tapped Architectural Record as its new magazine, a decision that put Architecture in dire straights, with few paid subscribers. So, in a do-or-die move, its publishers bought P/A, forcibly folded the magazine and took its 70-some thousand paid subscribers as its own. That off-the-wall move killed a former competitor, but it didn’t work financially. In the last several years, Architecture has struggled economically, while the Record has dominated the advertiser market, with some issues approaching 400 pages in length.
The AIA greased the wall, and Architecture magazine, rather than take a fall, pushed P/A instead. Some of the former P/A editors, myself included, along with Kevin Lippert of the Princeton Architectural Press and a New York dot-com company called Reach Networks, attempted to restart the magazine as an on-line publication and web browser. But no amount of hard work or money could put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The on-line world in 1996 was too new, and the revenue from publishing on the web too uncertain, as remains the case today. But even if we had tried to revive P/A as a print publication, the dominance of one magazine in the field enables it to suppress advertiser and subscription rates long enough to keep any upstarts permanently in the red. As a result, the American architectural profession may never have more than two national magazines, fewer than in countries a fraction of our size. Architectural Record may be the big winner, but we are all poorer because of it.
All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men
At the same time, the pieces of the architectural media continue to increase in number and variety. Local and regional professional journals have arisen, such as Architecture Boston and arcCA, to join already established and well-regarded regional publications such as Texas Architect and Architecture Minnesota. While a bright spot in the publishing world, these magazines all require some degree of subsidy from their AIA components, which curbs their editorial independence to varying degrees.
Academically based journals have also arisen, be they practice oriented like Praxis, theory oriented like Grey Room, or research oriented like Architectural Research Quarterly. While more independent—and to varying degrees, more esoteric—than the local AIA magazines, these journals all struggle with modest budgets, meager revenues, and small circulation numbers. Few of these journals will last over the long-term, although longevity may not matter much in an age of increasingly rapid change.
The rise of non-print media underscores that idea. Faxed newsletters, such as OfficeInsight, and e-mail publications such as ArchitectureWeek and Archvoices have arisen to serve the architectural community with mainly text-based information, with links to websites, where image quality and typography do count. These efforts, while admirable, have extremely modest revenue streams, resulting in their having almost no marketing budget and relatively little original content. They best serve as places to connect to or comment upon information generated by others, a valuable contribution, but hardly journalism.
In-house magazines represent another area of growth in the hardly-journalism category. Some of these publications amount to little more than house organs, taking the hard-sell approach by featuring the work of the firm and profiling clients or consultants. Others are more magazine-like, with articles about the markets they serve, the trends they see, and the lessons they have learned. These publications reflect the tension that has long existed in architecture between our being a trade, touting our wares, or a profession, sharing our knowledge.
Couldn’t Put Humpty Dumpty Together Again
The idea of knowledge sharing has become a major issue in the profession and central to the AIA’s strategic plan. While the consolidation and fragmentation of the architectural press may have something to do with it, the quality and depth of information we get—or more importantly, don’t get—through our media also plays a part.
Professions differ from businesses and trades in how they share information. If the latter hold proprietary knowledge and keep trade secrets, the former share what they know through practice and research. The other major professions—medicine, law, engineering—have excelled in knowledge generation and sharing, but architecture has yet to put all the pieces together on this.
The medical profession, for example, has a highly evolved knowledge loop, with a wide range of journals that get into the hands of physicians the critical information they need to do their work, based on research conducted in the medical schools and teaching hospitals, which in turn responds to problems encountered by physicians’ interactions with patients. Their professional press provides a key link in the integration of practice and research, which has led to the development of a remarkable knowledge base, with increased compensation following suit.
The knowledge loop between architectural practice and research has breaks in two places. Although we often teach or work together, architects and academics rarely talk to each other about the problems encountered in practice that merit research. Much of the research in our field, as a result, ends up having little bearing on practice. At the same time, the project-oriented research done in offices almost never gets shared more broadly, either for lack of time and money or out of a belief that such sharing will reduce a firm’s competitive advantage.
The failure here is one of communication, and the architectural press plays a major part in that. The journals in medicine help set the research agendas in the various areas of medical specialty as well as reporting on research results. The architectural press, in contrast, has traditionally focused on the process and the final form of architecture, with almost no reporting on the pre-design research-phase of projects and almost no evaluation of buildings after a few years of occupation to see what has worked and what hasn’t. Nor, with the exception of a few small-circulation research journals, does the architectural press report with any regularity on the research going on in the schools.
The AIA has just started to address this gap with a new research newsletter called AIA J, although it remains as much about research news— who is doing what—as about actual research findings that a practitioner can use.
If we are to thrive as a profession, we need a healthier and more rigorous press, with journals that cover in depth all phases of architectural practice and research. Some of these might cover key topic areas such as sustainability or security or digital tools. Other might focus on all aspects of the markets we work in—from design, practice, and technology innovations, to the economics, politics, and public policy affecting clients and communities. One thing is certain: we will not thrive with the press we have—one big Humpty Dumpty and dozens of under-funded fragments around it. If we don’t pay more attention to and take greater control of our media, the next big fall may not be another magazine, but the architectural profession itself.
Author Thomas Fisher, former editor of Progressive Architecture, is dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota.
Photo illustration by Ragina Johnson.
Originally published 1st quarter 2004 in arcCA 04.1, “Press Check.”
