welcome to the Society for the Protection of Architecture Magazines


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marshall McLuhan’s Playboy Interview

Image
Playboy March 1969 March, 1969. As the US was about to be distracted from the disaster that was Vietnam by landing on the moon, Playboy magazine published a lengthy interview with Canadian father of media studies and patron saint of Wired magazine, Marshall McLuhan. In nearly 14 pages of solid text, McLuhan talks about how society is only able to be consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it and how new media simultaneously extend the senses and numb them: “Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new  technology as a fish of the water it swims in.” He goes on to explain how “the visual function was overdeveloped” and how visual space replaced acoustic space of tribal man. He then gets a little hallucinogenic, predicting the return of tribal man living in “cosmic harmony”. There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. In another article in the same magazine, Arthur C. Clarke predicts that the solar sy
Read more

Michael Ventris

Image
Michael Ventris (1922-1956) graduated from the AA in 1948. However, he will be remembered as the man who deciphered Linear B – an early form of Greek script used for writing Mycenaean. After hearing Sir Arthur Evans say that the Minoan tablets hadn’t   yet been deciphered in 1936, he made it his life’s goal. By the age of 8 he spoke 5 European languages and throughout his life, he picked them up in a matter of months. He amazed his friends from the AA, Oliver Cox and Graeme Shankland, by slipping into the native tongue when they travelled to Italy and worked in Sweden together. Cox and Ventris’s entry to the T.U.C. Memorial Building competition were published in the AJ of 22.07.48. Ventris’ mother was friends with the art world’s leading lights like Gabo and Moore. Breuer made their furniture and Gropius personally advised the young Ventris to go to the AA. But he had a brilliant, analytic mind that produced sterile architecture. The design for his own house, which appeared in C
Read more

The Five Purpose Bath

Image
AD & C March 1935 The 1930s was a golden era of apartment building. Fitted kitchens and bathrooms started to become normal, alongside the hi-tech luxuries of central heating and electric sockets. In March 1935, Architectural Design and Construction (AD’s forerunner) published a reference section on “Bathrooms fit to sing in”. The author mocks the new-fangled kitchen appliances and asks “where ... is the automatic body washer?” One hears the clipped accent of the nascent BBC’s Queen’s English echo from the page: “It would be quite simple – just a matter of rotating brushes, scurrying flannels, and self-lathering soap” instilling a vision of a body-washing machine akin to a carwash sitting in the corner of the bathroom. The market became flooded with manufacturers offering sanitary ware of multiple uncoordinated sizes. The International Bath Association (I.B.A.) was set up and called for standardisation to address these pressing problems. It worked: “even such tremendous trifle
Read more