Design Book Review

Design Book Review (2019)

In the summer of 2018, I learned from David Eifler, the librarian at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, that Design Book Review, the quarterly that Laurie Snowden and I founded in 1983, was digitized in its entirety by Google and placed behind a firewall administered by the Hathi Trust. Eifler also told me how it could be made accessible. I forwarded this information to David Meckel at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco— the person there with whom Laurie and I negotiated our gift of the journal in 2000. Meckel sent it to others, including Keith Krumwiede, CCA’s new architecture dean. He wrote back immediately: “I can’t believe we own this!” At that moment, the stars finally aligned, bringing DBRback from the dead.

An event on 17 April 2019 at the Curatorial Research Bureau in San Francisco marked CCA’s launch of the digital archive. Now CCA Professor William Littman has given that archive a better portal. Looking ahead, CCA is planning symposia around DBRthat I’m hopeful will involve the editors when Laurie and I owned and published it: Richard Ingersoll and Cathy Lang Ho, a remarkable duo. Preparing for the launch event, Snowden and Littman posed some questions. Here are my responses.

You opted for an inclusive rather than a selective approach to design. Why?

One impetus for starting DBRwas the volume of design-related titles, a considerable part of which was aimed at practitioners. We saw our audience as literate professionals, so we felt we should cover books aimed at them. In time, we became more selective to counter what we saw as a lowering of standards by some publishers, and to keep the DBRissues at a manageable size. But we still wanted to cover design broadly—the whole field, not just architecture. This reflected the ideals of U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, which sent its Design Department into exile at U.C. Davis in this period. Professor of Design Frances Butler was an early DBRcontributor, so we were aware of this and opposed to it.

What were your major dilemmas or controversies?

We took some heat for issues on the John Hancock Tower in Chicago and the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, part of Richard’s “Buildings in Mid-Career” series. Some saw them as a sellout, but both issues have held up. An interview with Bruce Graham on Hancock was unintentionally funny, a bit like Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal. Our reexamination of postwar modernist icons, also

including the Ford Foundation and the Kimbell, coincided with the postmodernist and deconstructionist work and polemics then emerging.

What determined the character of the magazine?

Editorially, Richard had a strong, lasting influence. Shaping and reshaping DBRwas a collective effort, but Richard was able to connect ideas to people. He constantly came up with innovative themes and features. Early on, Mark Rakatansky helped us by enlisting contributors outside the Bay Area.

Gordon Chun gave DBRa robust template that allowed for any number of departures, but gave us a fallback for issues without themes and for the many reviews that fell into categories. Gordon invited Zuzana Licko to design the feature wells of several issues— work that is immediately identifiable as hers, and yet fits easily with the rest. Just as we were exceptionally lucky to have Richard as our founding editor and later to have Cathy as his co-editor, we were very fortunate to start out with Gordon. Cathy's sister, Betty Ho, art-directed and designed DBRissues from 1993 to 1999. (Lucille Tenazas designed the cover of the “Home” issue, our last before CCA took DBRover. Yingzhao Li worked on CCA’s first issue before CCA took it over. Lucille then redesigned DBR, setting a new look and format for CCA’s issues.)

To what do you attribute DBR’slongevity?

Our early losses were staggering—we were losing the equivalent of a Toyota Corolla a month at one point. So, getting it to breakeven was no small accomplishment. We ran DBRon a shoestring. Noticing that our newsstand sales often converted to subscriptions, we hired a Berkeley undergraduate to call bookstores, asking them to stock it. We ended up with a network of some 450 bookstores, plus distributors. One of them, which sold to Waldenbooks, was a goldmine while it was in operation. Our newsstand sales were substantially higher than our paid subscriptions. Our paid circulation was around 4,800 copies per issue.

Thanks to Laurie’s sister Kathy Snowden, my wife, we had ad sales from the outset—and some remarkably loyal advertisers. We

also won multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation. At different points, Bud Knapp, the founder of Architectural Digest, Dennis Cahill, the publisher of Architecture, and Hans-Peter Thür, the head of the Swiss publisher Birkhäuser, all expressed interest in buying DBR, but none of them followed through. MIT Press co-published DBRin the 1990s, an arrangement that ended messily. After we got it back, we did one issue before CCA took over. In short, we did what we had to do to keep it going. but we also produced one great issue after another, constantly rethinking the content. People liked it and kept reading.

What did you gain by being based in Berkeley?

As Lars Lerup noted at the time, Berkeley was “a suburb of New York.” Yet it was far enough away from Manhattan to be out of the fray of the often-bitter feuds of that era. Our contributors were on both sides of various disputes, but they saw us as neutral ground. It helped that our cottage-industry credentials were real. Early on, our kids put stamps on the envelopes in which we sent the issues out.

How did you decide on themes and special issues?

We constantly experimented. It helped that DBRwas a book review and thus retrospective and anticipatory at once. The ideas came from everywhere, but less from other magazines and journals, and more from events like Le Corbusier’s centenary and from the zeitgeist to which we were attuned. John Loomis both guest-edited our “Other Americas” issue and raised money to pay for it. (It won an AIA national book award and had a lasting influence.) Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre were similarly involved editorially. We were open to that kind of collaboration and willing to plunge in.

Were you influenced by other journals at the time?

We invoked the New York Review of Booksif people objected to being edited. We admired the AA Filesand sometimes ran articles from Casabellathat Richard translated. The Dutch journal Archis and another from Denmark caught our attention. Some of our UK contributors wrote for Architectural Design(AD) and Architectural Review. Andrew Rabeneck, a former editor at ADwho had taught

at the AA, was very helpful in opening doors. We also had crucial support early on from Spiro Kostof and Marc Treib at Berkeley, Kenneth Frampton at Columbia, and Bill Moggridge at IDEO.

What can younger people get from Design Book Review?

It documented two important decades in the history of design, the 1980s and 1990s, in an unusually thorough way, grounded in ideas and drawing on people in the different fields of design who were well positioned to comment. As a consciously “cultural” journal, it always “looked up” to ask what else was happening. Hence themes like “Posthumanism” and a willingness to engage transitions like industrial design’s embrace of the tech industry and modernism’s dialectical passage through postmodernism and deconstructionism. It also gave its contributors the freedom to range—it had some truly wonderful writing, which we encouraged and gave sufficient room. As written discourse struggles to get its bearings among competing genres, the online archive makes DBRaccessible as a precedent.

Note:

In his acknowledgements to Buildings in Print(Prestel, 2021), John Hill wrote:

It was important for me to read reviews of architecture books to ascertain how they were received upon initial publication, and in this regard Design Book Review...proved to be invaluable. The depths to which contributors reviewed architecture books in DBRis unmatched—before, during, or since.

I posted my answers to Laurie Snowden and William Littman's questions about DBRon my Medium site (johnjparman.medium.com) on 18 April 2019.