I hope I can clear up some confusions about the magazine without provoking a debate here.
The AIA does not own Architect magazine. It is owned by an independent publishing company. It is provided to members under a contract.
So to say the AIA should do this or that with the magazine is to misunderstand how much leverage it has over this company, which is not a huge amount. And, that is a good thing.
Because as soon as the AIA controls the magazine, which some people obviously think it does, people stop trusting it as an independent, objective voice. The Institute used to own its own magazine, AIA Journal. But a magazine published just for AIA members was not self-sustaining, and it died in a cruel death in the late 1980s.
A provision of the AIA's contract is that Architect must provide a set amount of pages in each issue to the Institute. The AIA can do whatever it wants with its own pages.
Content in the rest of the pages in the magazine is produced by the editors who work for the company that owns Architect. They operate independently.
However, Architect does have an editorial advisory committee that has many prominent AIA members on it. Their names are published in the masthead of every issue. I suspect they meet several times a year and discuss the very issues raised here with Architect's editors, and I am sure the conversations are taken quite seriously. I frankly DO think that the Institute's pages in Architect do a great job. Every issue features an interview of a member who has been doing issues-based work; there is an advocacy section, pages that show what chapters are doing in various parts of the U.S. Last September's pages on advocacy directly solicited member input for a future story. So they are involving members directly in their content.
In the September issue there was also very interesting story on the role of AIA members in getting obsolete sections of Interstate highway removed. And, of course, Clark Manus (your AIA president in case the name doesn't ring a bell) has an editorial in every issue.
The editor of this section is employed by the AIA, and works out of the AIA's office. It is just him and a graphic designer, and I think he does a GREAT JOB. Considering that the CEO of the Institute, Robert Ivy, was the editor in chief of Architectural Record for 15 years, I suspect that what is produced there undergoes a lot of scrutiny.
But remember the purpose of this section, and this magazine as well, is not to sway the opinions of the general public. The magazine's audience is the professional--Architect is not a general circulation magazine.
And the rest...
As far as the rest of the independently produced Architect magazine is concerned, first of all we should understand that any magazine's stories must appeal to a broad spectrum of people's interests. So it is pretty much impossible to please everybody all of the time. And, some people you can never please.
In seeking to understand what the greatest common denominator among readers is, in-depth surveys are conducted by every magazine one or two times a year. And, editors get phone calls, hundreds of emails and letters, and talk to people all the time. After awhile you know pretty much what works and what doesn't. Product coverage is always way up at the top of every survey, as is design. CEU related stories rank the highest because people need to read them and take the tests.
Now, the amount of time people spend reading print magazines has fallen off a cliff, so what you get today is the broad brush. Stories are short. It used to be that if you had readers spending 35 minutes looking at a magazine on average you were doing fantastically well. I suspect that it is much less now, probably 10 or 15 minutes, considering that competition from the Internet is eroding the amount of time people spend looking at paper magazines, and that if you still have a job you are doing the work of two people now, not one.
I know for a fact that every effort is made by both magazines (Architect and Architectural Record) to look for good design wherever it may be found. Much effort goes into finding a balance of projects, American vs foreign, midwest vs the coasts, not too much work by any one firm in a year, big firm vs small, etc.
Many, many of the projects are not done by starchitects, and many, many of the projects are small. Record has devoted entire issues to small projects. They do an issue every year called Vanguard that is for young and unknown firms. Usually they publish 10 of them. That's a lot.
But let's face it, you can do bigger story with a huge opera house than than a little office building somewhere. So, the opera house is going to get the pages. That doesn't mean that the office isn't great. But the editor runs the four beauty shots, some plans and text, and that's it. You can't get 16 pages out of it. That is one reason why people think magazines don't publish small projects or projects by unknown architects. Someone flipping pages 10 or 15 minutes a month might easily get that impression.
In terms of exactly what writers cover in a design story, there is a limited amount of space to document what are literally an unlimited number of factors that determined the outcome of a project. I think the magazines hit the high points the best they can.
There is no actual checklist, but yes, there are certain common elements that must be covered. Suppose you have 900 words. After you explain, for example, exactly how the site influenced the building, what the client wanted, tell about the structural system, and unravel what the architect said, you might not be able to feature the guys in the back room too. That doesn't mean they aren't important.
Both Architect and Architectural Record do publish cost figures for most projects. You may have to put on your bifocals to find them, but if it is not there it was probably not available.
I do believe the writing is very clear these days. But if an architect speaks in tongues, as many do, there is not much that a reporter can do about it.
The fact is that there is a lot of competition between these magazines to get the most interesting projects into their magazines first. As an editor you simply cannot wait until the paint starts peeling to weigh in on a new museum, office building, etc., when your competitors, the newspapers, the blogs, and television are covering it. If you ignore something, you look like a fool!
That said, I do agree that a lot of high profile buildings are idiotic and should not be published since it only encourages more idiotic buildings to be built. But, the fact is it is very difficult to resist the temptation to put the thing everyone is talking about on the cover of your magazine.
And, in the end, most owners who commission such buildings are doing it because they like the attention, and they like their buildings or the architect would not get permission to publish them.
Architect and Architectural Record do actually devote quite a bit of space to publishing construction details. In fact, Architect has an monthly section called "Detail." In their September issue there is a very interesting article about how A. Zahner, the company that makes the crinkled metal building skins for lots of prominent buildings, did the exterior of its own plant. I can tell you for a fact that there was much more written about the project than there was space to print it. These days that is just a fact of life.
Likewise many of Architects design stories have a page called, "Toolbox" that does cover details. They are good.
Photos and drawings are always supplied by the architects. I believe editors make every effort to make sure that between words, drawings, and photos what goes to the printer actually does explain how the building works. But again, there are not an unlimited number of pages to explain everything, and sometimes the drawings they want are not supplied.
Architect does cover project management, specifications, risk management, codes, laws, etc., etc., regularly. I think they are actually pretty good at it. In fact, the number of pages devoted to these topics annually actually exceeds what people say they are interested in. Practice, you see, always rests at the bottom of those surveys I mentioned above. Readers come for the bonbons. Not the spinach.
And with people not reading print articles anymore, you are not going to get a 2,000 word essay on contract documents. That is true even if an editor would like to bring it to you. Probably, however, you could find that essay on the Web somewhere on a site devoted to that topic.
Publishing information about product failures is done sometimes, sure, but it has to be understood that these magazines are supported primarily by ads, not subscriptions. They are not Consumer's Reports. And in our profession's magazines those ads are purchased by building product manufacturers. This produces inherent conflicts of interest that are best avoided, particularly if you are already just about broke because the recession has put advertising in the toilet, and your advertisers were already dropping print ads anyway.
It is not unheard of for one advertiser to push a magazine to go after his competitor, who might also be an advertiser. So, anyone with any sense would be reluctant to start going after a company's products unless there was unassailable evidence, and usually there is not. Lawsuits, you see, can put publishers out of business.
Actual serious building failures are almost always covered on Record's website (many stories are supplied by its sister publication, ENR) within 48 hours. Architect has a little different kind of operation, and I do not know enough about their record to speak to it.
Where code violations are sometimes detected by readers, let me say editors simply must assume that buildings which are occupied have certificates of occupancy, and that some arrangement has been made between the architect and the local building official to negotiate a resolution to the issue. Editors are not code experts, they have to be experts in too many other things.
I hope it will not be a shock for anyone to learn that sometimes handrails are just Photoshopped out.
So, I think that covers the main misunderstandings about the magazines that I thought needed some clarification. Most of the complaints about the magazines I see here are very familiar to anyone who has worked at one. You hear them over and over again.
But, you put in the drawings, you put in cost information, you run the practice stories, the disaster stories, balance out the coverage, do it for years and people just don't notice. Someone says, "Hey, you suck because you never write anything on contracts." And you learn that person completely missed the three-part series you concluded a month ago.
It can be very frustrating at times.
In case my name is not familiar to you, I have been editing magazines for architects for 25 years, and spent the best 20 of them at Record.
Hope that helps.
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Charles Linn, FAIA
New York, N.Y.
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