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...

The Sesquipedalist doesn't review buildings, but instead looks at them through the mediation of the page in order to learn how the profession constructs the image of itself and consequently creates its history. The current debate around Robin Hood Gardens in Tower Hamlets, East London is a fine example of this because:It's a debate initiated by the press. Firstly, the currently most influential UK...

Architectural Design commenced publication in November 1930 as Architectural Design and Construction with Frederick Towndrow as editor.His first editorial entitled "A Challenge to Mediocrity" sets out the policy for the new magazine:That the world's greatest war should be followed by a period of violent reaction and that its repercussions should affect every branch of human life was to be expected....

40 years ago, the Hayward Gallery opened and completed the trilogy that is the South Bank Arts Centre. The reception was almost universally poor. The Guardian of 17th July stated that "architecturally it is an expression neither of use nor site, that it is made of a material that was, years ago, proved odious in our climate." The AJ reviewed it on 10th July 1968, reporting that "it has that secreti...

In Sado-masochism: Criticism and Architectural Practice, Ignasi de Solà-Morales wrote: "the sadism of the critics symmetrically corresponds to the masochism of the practicing architects. Patient producers of artifacts whose meaning does not reveal itself naturally or evidently, the architects approach with their works on their backs, resigned to receive the lashes of their chastisers." So when a s...