Magazine Houses
It could be just me, but it looks like there has been a recent resurgence in magazines on the subject of Architecture. I don’t know if it’s some sort of ‘Mark Effect’ (see link below) or if architecture has suddenly become ‘hip’ or just sheer coincidence, but new magazines on architecture seem to be cropping up every few months. Over at MagCulture you can read about two newbies, Architect [magculture.com/blog/341] and PIN–UP [magculture.com/blog/340] . I have a few favourites already (if you’ve been following this blog you’ll already know how excited I was about Mark Magazine [mark-magazine.com]) so I thought it was worth noting a few down if you were feeling like checking any out:
I found this yesterday on the shelves of the Tate Modern bookstore and have become an instant fan. It’s designed and art directed by Arjun Groot [nultwintig.com/groot], who has already lent his witty and typically dutch style to magazines such as Blvd. and Credits and features a ‘noteboard’ style approach where articles seem to run on from page to page with features denoted by scale of images etc. It also includes a quirky selection of fonts that should fight one another but here they add energy to what could, otherwise, be a bit of a staid read.
Volume [archis.org]
Archis was a somewhat bewildering mixture of features about and around the subject of architecture with bizarre and seemingly random page layouts including perforated sections on the bottom of pages so you could tear bits of them off. Volume is a new project by the same team and, although some of the quirk has been knocked out of the format, it’s is still no less intriguing with a theme per issue. The latest version is about China.
(inside) [niche.com.au/inside]
Niche publishing are probably Australia’s premiere creative magazine publishers. Having said that, it’s disappointing to note that they have never seen fit to try and push any of their titles to a wider, international audience, which seems to betray a certain lack of confidence that is common to Australian Design in general. This is not to say they don’t produce some excellent titles. Niche’s ‘Interior Architecture’ magazine, (inside) is particularly good (sort of like an Australian ‘Frame’ [framemag.com]), if not just for the lush covers they produce. Architectural Review Australia [niche.com.au/ar] is also worth having a look at.