Architecture's expanding field: AD magazine and the Post-Modernisation of architecture

Abstract

This article investigates architecture's ‘expanded field’ – its turn towards culture during the 1980s when the profession expanded its interest to the softer practices of architectural culture. It looks in particular at the emerging enterprises of exhibitions, competitions and awards, publications, and symposia and lectures in the ‘long 1980s’, taken as the Academy years of AD magazine from 1977 – 1992.This period of AD is synonymous with architectural Post-Modernism, as Academy published much of Charles Jencks’ work on Post-Modernism, including six of the seven ever-larger editions of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.However, by analysing the content and context of AD magazine and the wider context of architectural institutions during these years, this article argues that the Post-Modernisation of architecture should be understood not only as a mere style, but equally as the emphasis on a growing architectural culture, discourse, and the ‘ideal’, and the retreat from building and the ‘real’. In other words, this period witnessed the establishment of architectural culture as a new type of practice, and furthermore, AD was instrumental in this cultural turn.

Publishing Research in Architecture, Urban planning and Landscape Architecture: Aims and Perspectives

“…27 The IAUS and its periodical hardened a self-referential discursive scene for the architectural elite surrounding its founders. 28 The analytical aim of the coordinators of this current issue of Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, urbaine et paysagère is similar to that of Stephen Parnell, in an article about the British journal Architectural Design ( AD) in the 1980s. Also examining the corpus of architectural journals, he particularly explores the role of journals in a complex communication system.…”

Expanding agency: The mapping of architectural design discourse in Indonesia's academic publications

“…As design plays a unique role in architecture both as a method of inquiries as well as a subject of research itself (Downton, 2003;Groat & Wang, 2013), the trace of design discourse in the academic journals is an important marker for the institutional development of the field. Academic publications offer a unique role in establishing the limits of architecture's institutional knowledge (Parnell, 2018;Parnell & Sawyer, 2020). Academic journals conventionally have been the primary media for communicating their research (Borgman & Furner, 2002).…”