In the above cited quote, Kevin Roche, a principal associate at Eero Saarinen’s architectural practice in 1957, recalls an early morning discussion about the design of the Trans World Airlines’ (TWA) Flight Center. Roche’s story about Saarinen reminds us that at the beginning of an architectural project, a solution may come from any variety of sources, not least of all from everyday objects. This was certainly the case for Saarinen, who found the seed for his design of the structural shells of the TWA Flight Center in the rind of a grapefruit. Despite its seeming novelty, Saarinen is not unique in his approach to the generation of architectural form with models; the Greek-French composer, architect and engineer Iannis Xenakis, who while working with Le Corbusier in 1957, used strings and thick wire to design the hyperbolic shell for their Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Expo. That a model will play a defining role in an architect’s approach to structural design is also demonstrated by the ‘spherical solution’ that Jørn Utzon discovered while stacking models of his Sydney Opera House’s shell roofs. These explorations with the expression of structure emerged at a time when a new generation of designers, including Eduardo Torroja, Pier Luigi Nervi and Felix Candela, had realised a handful of buildings using models to study and test structural form.

The phenomenon of participatory architectural design is thought to have emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in Europe. In 1969, Giancarlo De Carlo, one of its main advocates, presented a manifesto in which he asserted that ‘architecture is too important to be left to architects’, criticised architectural practice as a relationship of ‘the intrinsic aggressiveness of architecture and the forced passivity of the user’, and called for establishing ‘a condition of creative and decisional equivalence’ between the architect and the user, so that in fact both the architect and the user take on the architect’s role. He also argued for the ‘discovery of users’ needs’ and envisioned the process of designing as planning ‘with’ the users instead of planning ‘for’ the users.1 In the same year, De Carlo began working on a housing estate in Terni, Italy that involved future dwellers in design decisions. Among other participatory projects carried out around that time were Lucien Kroll’s medical faculty building for the University de Louvain (1970–6) and Ottaker Uhl‘s Fesstgasse Housing, a multi-storey apartment block in Vienna (1979).

If ever an architect bit the hand that fed, it was the young Arata Isozaki, a mercurial and uncompromising architectural talent who would go on to secure establishment respectability with the Pritzker Prize of 2019. But he made his renown with designs and exhibitions exploring themes of death and destruction, not least his ‘Fractures’ pavilion for the 1996 Venice Biennale, which sought to stage the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake from a year earlier, while also being a leading proponent of a playful, almost saccharine postmodernism, with projects including the Team Disney HQ of 1991. Immersed in the leading currents of Japanese architecture from the 1960s onwards, his tendency to snipe at the motives of his collaborators was legendary. Commentators have tried to account for these professional shifts and antagonisms, his dour and contrarian thematic obsessions, as well as his critiques of architectural traditionalism and technological progressivism. Why did he conduct his professional life and art this way? The conclusion seems to be that he was a nihilistic maverick pushing at the outer limits of architectural culture and even taste.

This article develops a theoretical framework for the relationship between the architectural magazine and architecture, understood as a profession, a discipline, and a culture. By developing David Abrahamson’s idea of ‘magazine exceptionalism’ from the field of magazines studies, it offers a definition of what constitutes an architectural magazine, arguing that to be architectural, a magazine must be a site of architectural production, as either a validator in the field of architecture or as an architectural project in its own right.

Pruitt-Igoe, in St Louis, Missouri, United States, was one of the most notorious social housing projects of the twentieth century. Charles Jencks argued opening his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, ‘Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite.’ However, the magazine Architectural Forum had heralded the project as ‘the best high apartment’ of the year in 1951. Indeed, one of its first residents in 1957 described Pruitt-Igoe as ‘like an oasis in a desert, all of this newness’. But a later resident derided the housing project as ‘Hell on Earth’ in 1967. Only eighteen years after opening, the St Louis Public Housing Authority (PHA) began demolishing Pruitt-Igoe in 1972 [1]. It remains commonly cited for the failures of modernist design and planning.

The housing estate of Julino Brdo was built in the late 1960s in the Čukarica municipality of Belgrade, and housed the ‘middle class’ of Yugoslav selfmanagement socialism – managers, experts, and administrators, in an area that was also populated by the improvised homes of illegal settlers. Approaching the estate from the north, the observer first notices two clusters of homogeneous masses rising out of a plateau known as ‘Grujina Strana’. As the observer moves forward, the estate briefly disappears from sight, only to reappear as a single cluster merged with the steep sides of the plateau.

The Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, curated by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, co-founder of Tokyo-based practice SANAA, included a remarkable twenty-four-minute 3D film by the German director Wim Wenders depicting the practice’s Rolex Learning Centre in Switzerland. Entitled If Buildings Could Talk, the film ran in a continuous loop, without a tangible beginning or end, much like the building itself. Invited by SANAA to develop the film, Wenders found himself confronted with a new type of space that he had no prior experience of, and no vocabulary to describe: ‘The Rolex Learning Centre’, said Wenders during a talk given at the Biennale, ‘is more landscape than building.’