Purple Diary

[November 7 2011]

Foreign Architects Switzerland (Switzerland)

ARCHIZINES PRIVATE VIEWING, LONDON

Curated by Elias Redstone, ARCHIZINES celebrates the recent resurgence of publications about architecture presenting 60 magazines, alternative publications and journals. From over 20 countries around the world, from Mexico City to Portugal and China, creative visions speak a discourse around architecture, its expressions in life and the future. Fighting back at the age of digital tyranny, photocopied publications and newsletters such as Another Pamphlet, Preston is My Paris, and Scapegoat experiment with the immediacy and living aspects of architecture in a personal, informal, and sometimes humorous way. Some even revert back to the nineties CAD fanzine publishing system, like the Portuguese Friendly Fire. Running through the exhibition, ecologically responsible planning and imaginative sustainable alternatives are driven particularly in publications Conditions, Mas Context, and KERB. Denmark’s MAP, produces a fold-out poster for constructive ideas on habitat survival during floods. Others take sarcastic or critical approaches, with magazines Criticat and New York’s textual Log journal (“a reaction to the consumption of images”), critically deconstructing architecture and its place within culture. Private, voyeuristic environments of anonymous couples at home and mental hospital wall studies even infiltrate through the pages of German publication Ein Magazin Uber Orte. Challenging authorities of vision in architecture, the new generation publications redefine its concept and communication, some going as far as being produced entirely by non-architects. They assert it’s not a specialist discourse, as globally embedded and influent as it is, but something everyone can be critical about.