Zur Aktualität des Medienverbundes Architektur und Zeitschrift
Creators: name: Froschauer, Eva Maria
Publisher: name: La Rivista di Engramma
Year: 2022
Subjects: Architectural Magazines
Berlin Around 1900
Change of Media
Media Representation
Photography
Visuality
Visualization

description: On the timeliness of media relationships between architecture and journals. Media and architecture have always been in a close, interdependent and mutually beneficial relationship. Apart from the very general understanding that architecture itself is a medium, the focus here is on a form of media that has only perhaps gone out of fashion – the trade journal, the magazine – which must be considered one of the most important forms of publication in the architectural scene for over two centuries. And at this point the question arises as to whether the printed journal has reached the end of its life, or whether its history teaches us principles and modes of action that remain relevant across past and still coming media changes. For apparently the basic rules of the game between representing and being represented have hardly changed: Architects must have specialized media skills, are supposed to learn from public relations manuals and should plan announcements and publications strategically, preferably on all available platforms – from journals to social media. What is often overlooked behind this statement is that the ‛architectural scene’ has always and essentially functioned in conjunction with media. The publications of architecture in different media formats constitute much more a lineage of tradition than a relationship of two components that must always be reinvented. This thesis is presented in three sections: the first deals with the at times momentous media changes in forms of representation for architecture; this is followed by an example of a media relationship between architecture and journals, illustrated by an excursus on ‛Berlin’ since 1900; the last section is devoted to the on-going effectiveness of the history of the relationship between architecture and the media of journals. In all cases, history is used to argue for the present. First, there are two short introductions that point to the current relevance and historicity of the subject. One example is the almost retroactive usefulness of a printed culture and fashion magazine for the ever-new manifesto representations from the workshop of OMA/AMO in 2021. We can contrast this with a very early reference from the 1910s, when Adolf Loos coquettishly complained that his architecture did not work at all in the latest representation of the time, photography, because he established himself against such a background as an influential ‛media maker’ of architecture in his own right. The first part, Architectural Representation and Media Change, argues through Mario Carpo's illuminating investigations into the connection between architectural thought and media representation – from handwriting to printing technology. Carpo thus achieves nothing less than to retell the media history of architecture since Leon Battista Alberti and to pose the explosive question: What effects does it have on building itself when long-practiced forms of reproducing architecture are ‛reformatted’ in terms of a change of media? Carpo thinks these media ‛shifts’ into the age of full digitization, questioning historicity and modernity. Against this background, section two then presents how a Lineage of Tradition of Media Relationships (using the example of the publication topic ‛Berlin’) spans two time periods from ‛c.1900’ to ‛c.1990’. The medium of the trade journal, in particular, repeatedly created a self-referential framework for the ‛architectural scene’ within which certain topics could be literally ‛made’. Two media examples, the journals Bauwelt (existing from 1910 until today) and Berliner Architekturwelt (existing from 1898-99 to 1919), were particularly dedicated to this ‛making’ of Berlin: Bauwelt was considered highly modern and ‛illustrated’ – or sought to serve the entire building industry with media services – and Berliner Architekturwelt endeavoured to create the idea and concept of ‛New Berlinisation’. A notion that was to become popular again around a hundred years later, when there was once again a struggle for the interpretative sovereignty of the concept of a New Berlin in the context of architecture. There is no doubt that the media “directed the image” (Werner Sewing). In the course of the 20th century, the architecture journals took on the role of being a relevant and combative medium several times, once with the classic avant-garde journals of the first decades of this century and later again with the many colourful ‛little magazines’ that pushed forward not only the architectural, but partly also the social renewal of the 1960s and 1970s. The final section of the text therefore asks the question whether an Effective Re-coupling of architecture and (printed) medium, one of aspiration and influence, is possible, especially against the background of the indisputably growing power of images to ‛show’ and ‛convince’ in equal measure. The conclusion once again emphasizes the mutual and reciprocal conditionality of architecture and its media, with the remark that architects themselves play a significant role in shaping and designing these media forms.