Robin Wilson
This is the key concern of Wilson’s text: the way in which the contributed content of a journal meets with and is shaped by the ideological determinations of its editors, such as those made blatant by The Architectural Review ’s disclaimer. Wilson’s gaze, however, is far closer than other studies of the journal: it moves beyond a particular editor or issue to an investigation the individual pages of the journals themselves - their construction and physical layout as much as their content. The result is an evolution of more traditional journal studies, aligned with art practice’s recent preoccupation with the ‘pagework’, treating the page as a space of performance, meaning and tension. Through such a methodology we are led from the surface of the page into its depths, emerging equipped to reassess the surface as a whole. As such Wilson’s work sits in something of a field of its own making. Crucial to the study are theories of the utopian from French theorist Louis Marin and Frederic Jameson, suggesting both the role of the journal as site of projection, but also one in which repressed utopian tendencies are seen to re-emerge, often against the editorial frame in which the work of architecture appears. Via Marin and Jameson, Wilson presents the journal page as a dynamic space that articulates both a repression of the utopian and its latent second-coming, disrupting the supposedly stable projection of architecture that the journal offers us. With each chapter structured around a specific case study, we move from Paul Nash in The Architectural Review to the photography of Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley in The Architects’ Journal , Lacaton & Vassal in Spanish journal 2G , Andrew Mead in The Architects’ Journal and finally the work of Hisao Suzuki, photographer for El Croquis . Each study demonstrates an instance in
which the traditional notions of the journal are challenged, be it by the primal scene of Nash’s Monster Field or the potential of Mead’s editorship to challenge representational norms. The case studies themselves move from relishing detective-like details - the broken bark of a fallen tree or the threads on a sleeve - to considering entire editorial and photographic practices as sites of utopian emergence. In this sense they not only demonstrate an unveiling of these specific sites, but construct a way of reading the journal page that, albeit with mixed success, could be subsequently applied to any other page. What unites each study is their sense of indeterminacy or even error, in which revelations of the utopic hinge on states of ‘doing nothing’ or indeed doing the wrong thing as with Lacaton & Vassal’s project in 2G , or absences in Mead’s texts in The Architects’ Journal . It is perhaps coincidental that these, as the ‘fault lines’ of architectural journal articles, are in themselves faults. Closure or reification is denied both in the sense of the depiction of an architectural ‘ideal’ and in the sense of a complete textual or photographic work. Yet for all these mistakes we also encounter measured digressions from institutional norms: the utopian impulse manifests itself both in ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms. Particularly memorable are the photographs of Suzuki, in which the editors of El Croquis , Fernando Márquez Cecilia and Richard Levene, repeatedly appear standing in the photographs of the buildings featured in the journal. For Wilson, this repeated deployment of the same figures is not only a divergence from photographic norms, but a reflection on the image’s mechanisms of production, containing the image of an architectural ‘idea’ that the journal propagates.
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