ON SITE r e v i e w
belatedly, Fall 2015
It is appropriate that this ultimate issue of On Site review should be about writing, as this is what architecture journals, magazines and reviews do: they write about architecture and urbanism, and a lot of other things, in words and images. Pictures alone, like a pure instagram site without captions, titles or text, are a new model – the image itself is like a found polaroid; the viewer applies a context, a narrative, a story; it is free and participatory. The sheer cost of doing a traditional print publication almost demands significant text to justify itself; the web is better, and faster, and cheaper at just putting out images rather than arguments. But argument is what writing is – the need to speak, to oppose, to confer, to confirm, to argue that one exists, that one has ideas, thoughts, hopes, fears. The writing in this issue is beautiful – so many people thinking intensely about the world and writing about it in delicately chosen terms. Thought; writing; journals: slow media. 34: on writing
Hector Abarca
contents
contributors page
3
Epistolary Architecture, the trans-Atlantic design network 1789-1837
2
Danielle Willkens
Open Letters
10
Miranda Mote, Chelsea Spencer, Irene Chin, Lara Mehlings
Digital Shalott, on the parallels of building and writing in the Virtual Age
14
Linda Just
About Reading
17
Troels Steenholdt Heiredal
Postmedium Narrative
18
Igsung So
On Writing (about architecture)
22
Thomas Nemeskeri
Forensic Criticism of N Ratsby in The Architectural Review
24
Jon Astbury
Notes on writing on architecture, Mark Dorrian’s Writing on the Image
28
Stephanie White
The Book Will Kill the Edifice
30
Daniel Fairbrother
Studying the architectural journal, Robin Wilson’s Image, Text, Architecture
35
Jon Astbury
Heralds of Their Own Gospel
38
Hector Abarca
Between Writing and Design
42
Thomas-Bernard Kenniff
A Hunt for Optimism in the Middle or thereabouts
44
Ted Landrum
Columns
46
Graham Hooper
Writing On Architecture, Times Square: signs and icons
48
Rick Lane
Reading Architecture 1
51
Stephanie White
Reading Architecture 2
52
Hector Abarca
who we are
54
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