Carlo Menon (UCL) - 2014-15 Students
c.menon.12@ucl.ac.uk

Critical Editorial Devices in a Minor Mode: ‘Little’ Architecture Magazines of the Early Twenty-first Century

As the inseparability between form and content inherent in the magazine format, this research project aims both at understanding contemporary ‘little’ architecture magazines as a medium and at investigating their relationship with the discipline as a whole, tackling a wide spectre of issues ranging from editorial devices, authorship and the status of the images to criticality, the “presence of the past”, mechanisms of cultural distinction and economy. Using magazines presently published in Europe as primary sources, the research is intended as a real-time investigation, from within, of a live material: a critical ethnography. It combines close reading and regular follow-up of several case studies with theoretical and practice-led speculation, in a transversal approach to the experimental tradition of little magazines.