Starchitects and Their Magazines

In 2018 Domus launched its “10x10x10” project, in which 10 architects would successively guest edit 10 issues for a period 10 years, all to celebrate the centennial of the famed Italian architecture and design magazine in 2028. Michele De Lucchi was first, followed by Winy Maas, David Chipperfield, Tadao Ando, Jean Nouvel, Steven Holl and Toshiko Mori, Norman Foster, and now Bjarke Ingels, guest editor for 2025. The first issue edited by Ingels just hit newsstands, but even before ink hit paper on this 1097th(!) issue of Domus, Ingels wrote a manifesto for his tenure as 2025 guest editor:

“When asked to formulate a manifesto as guest editor for Domus 2025, I felt rather than forcing the many voices of artists and architects into the ideological straitjacket of my own set of values — what if we shifted the lens from idealism to materialism?”

A few more snippets elucidate his idea:

“By reclaiming the term materialism from the realm of empty consumerism, we aim to bring it back to the practice of formulating our future through form and matter. […] We hope to return to the fundamental material nature of what we do. […] Architecture is essentially all the immaterial processes of society solidified in physical form. Our focus on material allows us to manifest radically different world views side by side, without distinction or discrimination. […] Our material odyssey will make space for collisions of clashing world views, so on the pages of Domus you will find side by side the traditionalist and the avant-garde, craftsmen and technophiles, the ornamental and the austere, the expressive and the tectonic, the global and the local, the pragmatic and the utopian. Conflicting ideas, united by matter.”

Setting aside the timely focus on materialism, one takeaway from his manifesto is that different points of view will be embraced, not contested or critiqued. This approach is indicative of wider shifts in criticism, not just in architecture, as the internet, apps, and streaming video have pushed professional criticism out of the way in favor of crowdsourced reviews and opinions. Such a situation brings us to our second magazine:

Launched in September 2024 by A+D Museum and Stray Dog Cafe (Thom Mayne’s personal art and research space at Morphosis), Of The Moment is a new journal that fills a void in the Los Angeles architecture scene. Architect Barbara Bestor sums it up best in a conversation between her, Joe Day, and Greg Lynn that runs like a ticker across the top of the issue's 50 pages: “Now that there are no architecture critics in Los Angeles at any of the major newspapers or architecture-focused curators at major institutions, we don't have a real public forum to talk about important architecture.” That lack, she continues, “speaks to why we might need an architecture magazine or newspaper for Los Angeles, so that there becomes some way of showing things underway that isn't as dispersed as Instagram or TikTok. Plus, how do you create a discourse that architects can also participate in?”

Yet, instead of creating a forum for the critics who no longer have a home at major newspapers, Of The Moment focuses on the last thing Bestor mentions: letting architects participate, by describing their projects and holding conversations with each other. And there are many such conversations in the issue: Michael Maltzan talking about the Sixth Street Replacement Viaduct; Craig Hodgetts, Neil Denari, and Mark Lee discussing the state of architecture in Los Angeles; the deans of three architecture schools (UCLA, USA, SCI-Arc) debating education; and Patrick Tighe, Lorcan O'Herlihy, Larry Scarpa and Angela Brooks, and Julie Eizenberg and Nathan Bishop talking about housing; to name just a few. Mayne makes two minor contributions: a defense of Eric Owen Moss's much decried (W)rapper; and a tribute to Antoine Predock.

This inaugural issue, guest edited by Frances Anderton, gives a very good sense of both the frustrations and pleasures of architects working in LA, but the lack of critical voices makes it the polar opposite of Los Angeles Review of Architecture, a special issue of New York Review of Architecture that was released in March 2024 as NYRA's “first venture to try to take the critical, architectural pulse of another city.” While it's not clear if LARA's abundance of criticism led Mayne and A+D to launch Of The Moment (it's a question one of the former LA architecture critics, Christopher Hawthorne, raises in the latest NYRA), critics have taken note of the new journal's preference for conversations over criticism.

Today, three months after Of The Moment was released, the wildfires that have devastated Palisades and Altadena, laying waste to neighborhoods and architectural marvels in the process, point to rebuilding being a concern for LA architects in the near future. Yet, as California Governor Gavin Newsom suspends environmental laws and certain permitting requirements to ease rebuilding in wildfire zones, critical input on rebuilding will be welcome, if anything, as a balance to any haste that puts people in harms way in the future. Although it's not clear if and when the second issue of Of the Moment or LARA will be published, perhaps the current situation points to the editors of LARA and Mayne/A+D finding common ground and both honing in on the role of architects and architecture in rebuilding Los Angeles in subsequent issues.