Numero monografico "Riviste di architettura. Traiettorie"
Abstract
“The Architects’ Journal” (AJ) was founded in 1896, and it is one of the oldest and most respected specialist publications for architects in the United Kingdom. A weekly magazine whose editorial stance is to “elucidate architecture as a process: the how as much as the what”, AJ filled a unique niche for the architectural profession and never had direct competitors. Despite this, its circulation across the twenty years of the digital turn dropped from eighteen thousand copies in 1992 to six thousand in 2014. When Information Technology (IT) and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) entered the market of architectural practices in the 1990s, AJ became the site of a radical transformation for the mediation of architectural knowledge. This paper explores the confluence of historical and technical factors within the design of the publication, integral to the change in wider historical conditions around architecture and media relationships. To do so, it focuses on two key moments of the digital turn. First, the emergence of digital drawings and renderings as a new visual medium of the journal, which caused a redefinition of format and content in the mid-1990s. Second, the full redesign of the journal to accompany the launch of the first AJ online portal in the mid-2000s and the design of new interactions between the two. The paper builds from the production-mediation-consumption paradigm outlined by design historian Grace Lees-Maffei, framing the journal as both a mediator and designed object in its own right. Using a combination of visual analysis, historical analysis of other relevant printed sources, and oral histories of former editors who oversaw the redesign of AJ, the paper will shed light on the new professional framework that puts media and public perception at the heart of contemporary architectural practices.
