studying the architectural journal
by jon astbury
It is such concerns that preoccupy the emerging field of architectural journal studies: one that works with the journal as more than a historical record but as the key to revealing the mechanisms of editorial projects and their wider impacts, from Townscape or Manplan in the The Architectural Review to the postwar avant-garde in Architectural Design . It is a particularly pertinent time in the history of the UK’s architectural press to undertake such studies. Amidst the longstanding and growing fear that the old greats - among them The Architects’ Journal and The Architectural Review - will be forced towards digital-only by their owners, we are faced with the prospect of this editorial frame being reduced to a simple online template. In light of this, writing a review of Robin Wilson’s book Image, Text, Architecture is something of a bizarre exercise, in that having read it I am now equal parts curious and suspicious of the processes my writing will be subject to once it is submitted. † Of course there may be spelling or factual mistakes, or issues of clarity, but most notably of all it will enter into On Site review ’s editorial strictures, be they in print or online, and will never be quite the same. To quote Wilson’s opening gambit, ‘the authored text…no matter how respectfully handled…has entered into profoundly different circumstances of legibility and meaning.’ † for the suspicious reader and writer, not a thing has been changed here, for better or worse, other than the impositions of font and column width and the addition of images. The text is the same as the original file. But form is all; two columns reads with different expectations than one typewritten page, so in this sense, yes, it will never be quite the same. —ed.
View the digital edition of November’s China edition of The Architectural Review and you will be met with a disclaimer: ‘This is to make clear that all contributors, including photographers and writers and the institutions they represent in a personal capacity, had no prior knowledge of, and are not responsible for, the editorial presentation of their work.’ We often overlook the complex gulf that can exist between the representation of an architectural work and its editorial presentation: a relationship that, in the case of China, can be an extremely dangerous one to negotiate. In The Architectural Review ’s China Issue, the representation of architecture was one that, on the whole, sported a conventional genre of flattering photography, and yet its editorial frame took a far less flattering stance on the Chinese state, a stance that was then treated as an independent entity. Naomi Stead has remarked that such self-censorship is what defines criticism, which can only progress by becoming more aware of its agendas and allegiances. The movement of a photograph or piece of text from its owner’s possession into the pages of a journal is a highly transformative one: there is, arguably, no going back. The journal draws upon many sources in its presentations of architecture, but rather than flatten them all together in a neat institutional package, they each retain their complex ideologies and jostle against one another within the journal’s editorial frame.
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Robin Wilson. Image,Text, Architecture Farnham, Surrey:Ashgate, 2015 252 pages ISBN: 978-1-4724-1443-4 www.ashgate.com
Robin Wilson
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