From November 14 2006 – January 31, 2007, Storefront for Art and Architecture hosted the exhibition Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196x – 197x, curated by Beatriz Colomina, Craig Buckley, Anthony Fontenot, Urtzi Grau, Lisa Hsieh, Alicia Imperiale, Lydia Kallipoliti, Daniel Lopez-Perez, and Irene Sunwoo from Princeton University, in collaboration with Olympia Kazi.

At the time, there had been a resurgence of international interest in the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, there was the idea that the role of the many experimental publications that were the engine of this creative period had been largely neglected. The exhibition Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Architecture of Little Magazines, 196x – 197x tracked the critical function of the little magazine in architecture during these years, when a remarkable outburst of publications disseminated and catalyzed a range of experimental practices. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term “little magazine” was remobilized during the 1960s to grapple with the contemporary proliferation of independent architectural periodicals that appeared in response to the political, social, and artistic changes of the period. Clip, Stamp, Fold investigated how an internationally diverse group of architectural little magazines informed the development of postwar architectural culture.

In the exhibition, the terms “little” and “magazine” were not taken at face value. In addition to short-lived, self-published magazines, Clip, Stamp, Fold included pamphlets, building instruction manuals, as well as professional magazines that experienced “moments of littleness,” influenced by the graphics and intellectual concerns of little magazines. The exhibition charted the temporal progression and transformation of the phenomenon of little magazines through the design of their covers, and also took stock of different magazine forms and how they were put together, introducing rare originals from private collections and providing facsimiles accessible to the public. These displays were complemented by a selection of interviews with editors and designers of these publications.

If the little magazines of the 1960s and 1970s were the engine of an intensely creative period of architectural design, they also provided a space for architectural theory to flourish and an arena for critical discussion of the role of politics and new technologies in architecture. With their dissemination, these innovative and energetic documents also established a global network of exchange amongst architectural students, avant-garde architects and theorists, as well as a means to situate themselves within the historical context of architectural publishing of progressive thought and design. An implicit aim of the exhibition, then, was to invite reflection on contemporary uses of media in architecture, and how these fit into a broader historical context. 

 

Assembling all these remarkable documents for the first time offered a unique view of a key period of architectural innovation and challenges faced by architects to provoke a similar intensity.

The exhibition was a collaborative effort by a team of PhD candidates in the School of Architecture at Princeton University led by Professor Beatriz Colomina and was made possible through the generous support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts along with the School of Architecture, the Program in Media and Modernity and the Graduate School of Princeton University. 

 

http://www.clipstampfold.com/ 

Covers (l to r) : Megascope 1, 1964 ; Utopie : Sociologie de l’urbain 1, 1967 ; Bau : Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau 1/2, 1968 ; ARse 3, 1970 ; Casabella 367, 1972.