Architecture, Writing And Criticism In The 1960S And 1970S

If current architectural magazines seem more and more condemned to an a-critical role, they once constituted important breathing spaces for criticism. The two decades between 1958 and 1978 are particularly interesting in this regard, as they saw the explosion of a large number of olittle magazineso. Independent, non-commercial and unconventional, these periodicals functioned as laboratories of thought, exploring both the boundaries of the discipline and diverse ways of critical writing. Retracing the little magazines' origins into literature and examining two concrete examples, this paper hopes to reveal the critical potential of these journals both as platforms for debate, as instigators of change and as agents provocateurschallenging the architectural discipline and renewing criticism's relation to architectural practice.