Becoming small and being great

Becoming small and being great Arjen Oosterman The history of the Dutch architectural magazine is the history of emancipation, interest groups, convictions, changing influences, power relationships and, as the end of the twentieth century approached, increasing pressure toward commercialization, although the presence of commercial forces at the beginning of that century should also not be underestimated.

If I limit myself here to the history of Archis, at the risk of one-sidedness and even bias, the genealogy of this magazine, now spanning more than 80 years, displays all the above-mentioned elements.

Founded as R.K. Bouwblad (Roman Catholic Building Magazine) in 1929, the fortnightly specialist journal formed a platform for the Catholic community. People could become acquainted with one another’s work, discuss and assess it, and jointly decide on the principles of good architecture. It was made by (a certain part of) the profession for (a certain part of) the profession. With a few intermediate transformations, this magazine reached the Second World War, during which it had to stop, and was resurrected after the war as the Katholiek Bouwblad and eventually became the Tijdschrift voor Architectuur en Beeldende Kunsten, TABK (Magazine for Architecture and the Visual Arts). After the war, the previous predominant focus on church construction and other Catholic building assignments, including the role of the decorative arts, gave way to an increasingly comprehensive interest in architecture and art as expressions of society. On this basis, the merger with the social-democratically inspired Wonen (Living/Dwelling) was perfectly understandable and feasible. This latter magazine, founded in 1946 as Goed Wonen (Good Living) as a magazine that catered to the emancipation of the common citizen and particularly the working man, especially with regard to their way of living, also underwent all kinds of developments, but had a financially solid core in the Stichting Wonen (Foundation for Living), at least sufficiently solid and independent to be attractive to TABK. At the end of 1972, TABK threatened to become a component of the Telegraaf concern, and that was going too far for the by now rather progressive publication and its editorial team. After all, De Telegraaf was one of the enemy.

By taking its subscribers with it to the new magazine Wonen-TABK, the publication could be saved from the jaws of the fascistic and abject realm of big business. These were the heydays of the great democratic surge, the Netherlands was on the verge of forming the first progressive Cabinet, and the production of social housing had reached an unsurpassed level (in quantity). Whatever the case, the feelings of the TABK editing team were shared by the subscriber. The bold merger resulted in a quantum leap in sales figures, with almost no loss of subscribers from either side.

With the transformation of the Stichting Wonen in the seventies from a purely interior-oriented club to a group that directed public awareness to architecture and urban planning, while also advocating variation and small-scale solutions, it was no surprise that the Wonen TABK magazine paid ample attention to the city and to urbanity. This largely corresponded to the way the new view on architecture as an oeuvre and the discussion on autonomy in particular coincided with developments in education and theory-forming in the early eighties.

It was therefore only logical that a more luxuriously designed magazine, on good paper, with an increasing number of colour pages and a larger format, was needed to conduct that discussion. The step toward a monthly magazine, a thicker, larger and more attractive publication, was taken in 1986, and the almost impossible merger name was replaced by Archis. This move gradually generated more

new subscribers, which can be partly attributed to a more wealthy population (even the growing number of students could afford a subscription), and partly to the range of themes covered, which appealed to domains outside of architecture, urban planning and urban sociology (particularly architectural history and the conservation of historic buildings). From being a magazine that politely sized up its own faction and attempted to draw attention to its qualities, the magazine had now developed into a normative body in the architectural debate. This seemed to be a rock-solid position, and that was indeed the case for some time, certainly when, due to a whim of fate in Dutch politics, the Stichting Wonen merged with two other organizations to form the Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, NAi. With this, the magazine was not only firmly entrenched in Dutch architectural policy (which turned out to be internationally revered in the mid-nineties), but it was also gradually and increasingly confronted with the restrictions involved in this type of construction. Whereas it had been relatively easy for the independent editorial staff to steer an own course in the times of the small, flexible Stichting Wonen, partly because the Stichting directed its endeavours toward a different public with its exhibitions and educational packages, conflict was never far away within a large-scale and national organization such as the NAi. And that soon came to pass. If Archis could not be expected to propagate the policy of the Institute, it should at least embody its principles and certainly not hold it up critically to the light. But that was an inevitable step for a magazine with national and increasingly international ambitions. Its own domestic set-up could not remain undiscussed, just as the productions of that setup (exhibitions and other activities) could not remain unmentioned. The Dutch government still managed to subsidize these dissenting voices, but at the scale level of an organization with around 100 employees, a department that regularly makes critical utterances about the operations of others in the same company soon becomes problematic.

In the same period, a completely different issue also played a role in undermining the foundations of the Archis model. This destabilization had been set in motion by the editorial team itself, and involved the increasing subordination of the architectural magazine to the corporate policies of its professional colleagues in the workfield, the architects. A part of the problem lay in the fact that they were only professional colleagues to a limited extent. Since the seventies, the editing teams of architectural magazines – and Wonen-TABK / Archis formed no exception here – had been gradually taken over by professional journalists, historians of architecture, and architects without a building company. The tight connection between production and reflection, which had been characteristic of the architectural magazine until the mid-seventies, had been severed and replaced by a professionalized ‘caste’ of architectural critics.

Another part of the problem was the increasing commercialization of those professional colleagues themselves, who gradually mastered the game of acquisition, self-promotion and the generation of publicity. The paradox that the influence of architectural criticism declined and independence in reallife practice meant less and less as the number of architectural magazines and general interest in architecture (in newspapers and weekly mags) grew formed a serious problem for the editorial staff of the magazine. At least, this was the case when a magazine is produced on the basis of ideological or cultural ambitions. It was a golden age for the magazine as a profit-making enterprise.

The control by individual architectural offices of the visual material to be published (the creation of an image in a literal sense) and the increasing instrumentality of the architectural magazine to support the corporate policies of the architectural office provided the raw material for the schism with the formally comfortable position of Archis. An independent position was again sought, in form and theme, by rejecting the glossy character of the magazine and largely abandoning the discussion of buildings. This was underlined by dropping the disciplines of architecture, urban planning and visual art (which had formed the subtitle since 1982) and replacing these with ‘architecture, city, image

culture’ as domains of coverage (since 1997). That this would eventually mean the loss of a part of the reading public was accepted as an inevitable consequence.

This being the case, all the ingredients necessary for a break from the Nederlands Architectuurinstituut in 2001, and eventual publication under an own management, have been summed up. The problematization of form and content of the magazine (the magazine itself as design assignment) in an era of image culture and increasing digitalization was appreciated to varying degrees, and meant an accelerated farewell to a faithful group of readers who had hoped for criticism on buildings and books. The fact that the magazine was appreciated to a greater extent abroad than at home (Archis had become bilingual in 1993 and appeared in separate Dutch and English-language editions from 2001 onward) reinforced the belief of the editorial team that the architectural discussion ought to be conducted in an international context. But this was also partly due to the retarding effect of tradition and the corresponding expectations at home and the absence of these abroad (‘the fresh outlook’). In the meantime, the demands of the Dutch culture-political agenda continued to obstruct a genuinely free orientation toward international themes as a result of the governmental subsidy.

With the introduction of VOLUME, a project by Archis + AMO + C-lab + …, and thus a co-operative venture involving a magazine, a think-tank of an architectural office (OMA) and a research section of an architectural educational organization (Columbia University), the last step toward a truly international and more proactive set-up could be taken. Since 2005, the adage has been ‘to go beyond architecture’ and the magazine has been strictly thematically structured. In this context, the possibility of architecture has become the starting point, rather than architectural production. Accordingly, the ambition of the magazine has shifted further away from expressing opinions and nourishing the mind, and toward debating, intervening and designing.

The complex and lengthy history of Archis qualifies two hypotheses on ‘small magazines’: the first is the observation that a small magazine that satisfies the characteristics of experiment and independence emerges from the personal need of its creators. With that, this type of title is more or less synonymous with its editorial staff and cannot rely on a long lifespan if its initiator leaves. Archis demonstrates that a magazine can undergo a phase as a small magazine if this is the choice or attitude of the editorial staff toward the surrounding world. The fact that this is possible has much, if not everything, to do with the institutional history of Archis and with the watertight editorial statute that determines not only the institutional history but also the title ownership in the case of termination or liquidation.

A second observation concerns the independence of architectural criticism. As Roemer van Toorn argues, independent architectural criticism is contradiction. At the level of building criticism there is the previously mentioned problem of the independence of the architectural office. Several dependences can be added to this, such as the profile of the magazine in relation to advertisement sales (and thus income) or the bond with the readers (who normally do not want to be insulted, alienated or too surprised). On all these points, history shows examples of conflict and loss, but there are also examples (and Archis is certainly not the only one) that magazines can successfully pursue their own course, that editorial teams can produce the magazine that they wish to produce (not dictated by readers’ surveys or acquisition profiling). This does not necessarily repair the cultural fracture between criticism and practice, but if the makers no longer or hardly ever enter the field of reflection and criticism, reflection will surely have to enter the field of the makers.