Little Big Mag: Radical Magazines and Architectural Criticism

For all the myriad look-backs at the music, literature, art and cinema of the 1960s counterculture, surprisingly little has been written about the period’s architecture. One major reason is that as an art form constrained by utility, bureaucracy and budgets, architectural production is generally slower and more conservative to react to the times. But architecture did have its own nouvelle vague, and it wasn’t on the construction site. It manifested itself in a profusion of small, largely independent, jarring and irreverent media: little magazines. It’s taken several decades, and the concerted work of Beatriz Colomina and her doctoral students at Princeton University’s School of Architecture, to make the first comprehensive exhibition of this unique phenomenon and its residue on contemporary architectural culture…

Buy Issue 109 to read Adele Weder’s entire article!