Tropolism Magazines: PIN-UP

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The second entry in our, er, two-part series about new architectural magazines we like this week is PIN-UP, giving us helvetica love from the logo through the back cover Comme des ad. Published in New York, the magazine's inaugural issue features a layout suggested by its name: clean, collage like, and powered by ideas. In the dark days of architectural publications which we now live, where great aging publications like Architecture, P/A, and The Gutter have all fallen to the wayside, it is difficult to find one that is still up and running, much less remotely interesting.

PIN-UP plays both meanings of the double entendre embedded in its title. It feels casual, easy to pick up and leaf through, with great pictures art directed for a general, design-friendly audience. It also gets behind the clothes of the architect, in many figurative and literal ways, putting architects like Jurgen Mayer H., Zaha Hadid, Winka, and Charles Renfro on display as people/props to be studied, as much as the work they produce. This is to say nothing of the brilliant, phallic, tower-porn photo series, something straight out of Dutch/Matthias Vriens from 1999. The brilliant tendency of this magazine is to collapse both sides of the double entendre into a single article, as in the article about Jurgen Mayer H., constantly pictured (they are video stills) undressing or in bed in a hotel room, next to details of his buildings and installations. It is a perfect encapsulation of how architectural design consumes the lives of architects who build, particularly those famous architects who lecture around the world. Bravo.

And, as icing on the cake, they reprint an article from Beatriz Colomina in the back, her brilliant piece about Corb raping Eileen Gray's house with a mural from the 1980s. Cred building.

BTW, Comme Des, want to advertise on Tropolism?

Via Jason Thome, our own personal cool hunter.

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