The Right to Read

Matthew Allen
January 2023

Consider that the Bill of Rights is a written document. “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble...” There’s a tempo to reading. Do you find yourself absorbed in quiet contemplation? On a lazy afternoon it might go unnoticed, but cramped on a crowded commute, the active effort required to focus attention and sustain an inner dialog is inescapable. These moments of hard-won private reverie are crucial to public life. It’s not only that abstractions like democracy and freedom depend on concrete practices carried out in a chaotic public sphere—the practices create the public realm. Just as locally negotiated systems of shared cattle grazing created “the commons” as it was traditionally manifest, our ways of carving out space for reading set up contemplation as a public good, a shared resource.

The value of a thriving attentional commons (to use Matthew Crawford’s term) has been recognized by progressive reformers since the advent of modernity. Take, for example, a proto-modernist slogan neatly lettered above the bed in a relatively minimalist Arts and Crafts bedroom designed in 1897: “Seven hours to work, to soothing slumber seven, ten to the world allot and all to heaven.” What is “the world” in this scenario? Through a process of elimination, we can infer that it’s not work, not sleep, and not spiritual transcendence. The philosopher Hannah Arendt often spoke of “the world” as the realm of highest human achievement, populated first of all by works of art and literature, which she distinguished sharply from entertainment. I find it hard even to imagine having ten hours a day to devote to “the life of the mind” (the title of Arendt’s last book) or “arts and letters” (a thoroughly anachronistic concept), and so it’s difficult for me to gauge the contours of a thriving attentional landscape. It’s not simply that there’s not enough time to ingest information. A feeling of information overload already percolated in medieval monastic libraries, and a technological solution—encyclopedias—developed during the same period. The problem seems to be elsewhere: in the habits and habitats that provide us with the mental and physical resources to read and make use of that reading. Even if the quality of information and access to it has grown, the quality of attention at our disposal has been actively undermined. Social media is an obvious culprit, with legions of programmers tapping the techniques of behavioral psychology to capture every micron of attention. The attention economy is among the wildest frontiers of capitalist development.

Photograph of a bedroom by Liberty’s, 1897 in Interior Design of the 20th Century by Anne Massey
(Thames and Hudson, 1990), 16.

Thus the question of who can read—who has the time and attentional resources—has become one of the most consequential conundrums of our present era. The complexity only mounts in specialized disciplines like architecture. Following revolutions in linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, architecture since, say, 1960 spent several decades as a highly erudite field—a field premised on reading and writing. The creation of PhD programs established a class of academic architects as professional readers, and, at the same time, the intrigues of French intellectual life in its poststructuralist heyday rendered difficult concepts as popular spectacle. Reading was edgy. All this was directly correlated with how design was conceptualized. Buildings could be subject to “close reading,” and a good project would have a tight “logic” and present a clear “argument.” On the insights of deconstruction a whole theoretical edifice was built featuring the slippery mechanics of language. Its focus on openness and indeterminacy encouraged the average architect to play along. (There’s no wrong answer in the absence of Truth and Authority.) If, since then, architects are reading less and bringing to it a different quality of attention, this also means that the foundation has shifted beneath a broad swath of basic disciplinary concepts. Maybe architectural theory as it was once understood has already collapsed.

Media theory can help us sort through the wreckage and rebuild. Marshall McLuhan wrote about hot media and cool media: the former provide lots of information but offer low participation (like reading a book or watching a film) while the latter have low information bandwidth but demand high levels of participation (like a group chat or a discussion seminar). McLuhan’s contemporary, Walter Ong, followed with an extensive comparison of literary cultures versus oral cultures. Perhaps humanity has gone from orality (in archaic cultures) to literacy (for the past few thousand years) to secondary orality (with the cool media of the electronic age) and most recently to secondary literacy (how we read text on our phones). Something of the return of certain features of oral culture—which is premised on communal, participatory sociality—was vividly prefigured by Superstudio’s collages of “nomads” (really: disaffected western youth) lounging on the Supersurface. The next step is to jettison the romantic yearning for a simpler form of life and try instead to learn from contemporary oral cultures. How do you organize a fruitful discussion? What are the parts of a good story? What guides the listener (or reader) along the way? Storytelling encompasses all sorts of practices: chatting things over to make sense of the world around us, project presentations and jury discussions, but also oration and demagoguery. (As with any other technology, the potentials of storytelling can be used to good or bad effect. Just think of the impact of the microphone on politics in the twentieth century.) The realm of the live-and-in-person has affordances and techniques that can counter trends toward exclusive expertise with an imaginary of public abundance.

Which brings us back to the attentional commons. Attention is usually seen as a resource to be extracted or a means of extracting some resource. Advertisers are vying for your eyeballs; reading is a means of gaining some proprietary knowledge. A Gestalt shift is required. Conceptualizing a right to read is not about reading more, but imagining a world in which reading thrives—and the most important result might be that space is made for collective life of a more deliberate, open, and satisfying variety.

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Matthew Allen teaches theory and history at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Flowcharting: From Abstractionism to Algorithmics in Art and Architecture.

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>>Who Gets to Write?

On the Economics of Writing (About Architecture)

Stefan Novakovic
January 2023

I: Writing for a Living

I started writing for a living by accident: It was in 2015, my last month of college as an unexceptional English major with no plans after graduation, that I decided to write about cities and began my research. My brother, an architect, pointed me toward Urban Toronto, a niche news site covering the city’s development industry. I saw their call for interns. Saddled with student loans, moving to New York City for an unpaid internship was out of the question. But if this was less prestigious (and less competitive), it was closer to home—my parents’ home in Toronto, anyway, where I would be living after graduation. I gave it a shot.

I was thrilled. For three days a week, I wrote about urban development. The other four days, I worked a minimum-wage job in the gift shop at the Libeskind-designed Royal Ontario Museum, where even the floors were slanted. I preferred the writing. And so I learned as much as I could. I bought all the books on urbanism, architecture, and Toronto that I could find. At the end of the summer, the publishers at Urban Toronto offered me their assistant editor position, $1,500 a month. It wasn’t much, but more than I was making at the gift shop. I said yes.

Back at my desk, still shaking with excitement, I ran the numbers. $18,000 a year was less than minimum wage, and legally, I wouldn’t have a “job”—I’d have a full-time gig, with all the responsibilities of a permanent position and all the rights of a freelancer: a real journalist.

Urban Toronto had been founded as an online discussion forum—citizen journalism for architecture geeks in the early 2000s. By the time I joined, the website had been bought by a publishing company and had a mandate to produce daily news about development proposals or construction projects across the city. 

This meant sifting through thousands of pages of public records, zoning applications, renderings, architectural drawings and urban planning rationales; I learned about architecture through the civic bureaucracy. Over two-and-a-half years, I attended about 50 community meetings and dozens of housing protests and organizing events. I would often write two or three posts a day at a twelve-hour turnaround. 

In 2017 I began my first job in traditional architectural publishing, working as the assistant editor at Canadian Architect magazine and its sister publications, Canadian Interiors and Buildings. At $35,000 per year, my “job” was, legally speaking, another full-time freelance gig. The magazines were legacy print publications dating back to the mid-twentieth century, and had been part of Conrad Black’s media empire. By 2017, they were run by an independent publisher on a shoestring budget.

Although I did little serious writing—to get any meaningful writing opportunities, I wrote ad hoc print articles with no extra pay—my two years with Canadian Architect helped me learn the business—how press releases and publicists shaped the media landscape, and how magazines prioritized coverage. Reviews of new projects were the backbone of trade magazines; for a building or a book review to be published, it had to be pitched. The kind of on-the-ground, public record journalism I had learned at Urban Toronto was anathema.

After Canadian Architect, I became the web editor at Azure, a magazine that covers architecture and design internationally. For the first time, I had a real job with dental insurance—and enough money to pay the rent. Today, as Azure’s senior editor, I’m able to carve out more room to write and publish what interests me. With a monthly allocation for freelancers, I read and consider numerous pitches from writers with interesting ideas. 

II: The Business of Writing

Success is often as much a function of industry savvy and shrewd networking as it is original thinking and good writing. Every magazine is delivering a product to a consumer. Publications like Architectural Record, The Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis, Architect and Canadian Architect are considered “trade” or business-to-business (B2B) publications. Their advertising is aimed specifically at architects and designers—product specifiers. Instead of sneakers and Snickers bars, you’ll see bathroom fixtures, windows and doors, office furniture, lighting, high-end kitchens, etc. This economic reality shapes the nature of a magazine’s content and how they present it.

If more mainstream consumer media give you tips for renovating your kitchen, trade magazines give you tips for renovating other people’s kitchens. Only, when you’re writing for a professional audience, they are never “tips”—they’re examples of new and emerging trends or design philosophies. The tone differs, and so does the perspective. 

When advertisers are looking to sell door handles and ceiling baffles to industry insiders, they don’t want to see their audience insulted—or even challenged. So the mandate for trade magazines often errs on the side of celebrating design rather than critiquing it. (Twenty years ago, when many trade magazines were still filled with ads for Cadillacs and credit cards, there was less concern about losing revenue through criticism.) While there may still be room for intelligent, critical writing in these publications—The Architect’s Newspaper does a particularly good job—it’s not their bread and butter.

While trade magazines offer occasional opportunities for serious critical writing towards more established writers, it’s a hard door to open, if it budges at all. Let’s say a writer has an idea to review a new public space in their neighborhood that really works (or doesn’t), or they want to investigate whether the buttons they push at a crosswalk actually do anything. Maybe there’s a compelling building in their city with a story that hasn’t been told. Pitches like these are more likely to be published by “consumer-facing” design media, like Curbed or Bloomberg CityLab, than by B2B publications. 

Alternatively, a writer wanting to critique aspects of architectural practice or discuss the ideas of Manfredo Tafuri, for example, will likely find a better reception in subscription-funded or non-profit publications like Failed Architecture, Common Edge, and the New York Review of Architecture (NYRA). For a new writer, the best place to start these days might be the New York Review of Architecture; in particular, NYRA’s weekly Skyline newsletter offers a great opportunity to write a short piece or “dispatch” about a recent lecture or event. Unlike trade magazines, these publications don’t rely on advertising revenue, and unlike more mainstream design media like Curbed and CityLab, they don’t rely on a mass audience. This means they can serve a smaller, but highly dedicated readership, and produce critical, irreverent, and creative journalism that engages with theory, materialism and global flows of capital.

III: Writing and Class 

Architectural writing rarely provides a decent living on its own. Very few people work in the field full-time, and those of us who do are almost invariably burdened by a volume of “content” and administration that makes thoughtful, meaningful work difficult. (In David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, in-house magazine journalists self-identified their work as a quintessential example of useless “box ticking.”) And while it’s easy to romanticize its quixotic nature, architectural writing faces the same existential crisis as journalism writ large: It just plain sucks.

When a career path is no longer financially viable, it becomes a job for rich people and limits the talent pool. That’s what happened to journalism. But to make matters worse, architectural writing relies heavily on what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described as “social and cultural capital.” If you know how to speak the language of the publishing industry—often gatekept through jargon learned in elite schools—then success can look easy, especially if you’re not worried about money. But if you’re working a demanding, full-time job (or more than one), when will you find time to write? And if you didn’t go to a prestigious school or live in a major city, opportunities to get your work published can feel especially scarce. 

I’m still here because I believe in the power and beauty of writing. It is a privilege—and a thrill like no other—to be able to share thoughts with the world, and to see them come alive. That’s worth embracing, too. And as hard as it is, it doesn’t take much to start: Each day, I try to write a good sentence. And then I look for the next one. 

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Stefan Novakovic is a writer and editor living in Toronto. You can reach him at stefan.b.novakovic@gmail.com

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>>Who Gets to Write?

Speaking of Writing

A Conversation with Scott Colman,
Sydney Shilling, and Brittany Utting
January 2023

For Architecture Writing Workshop’s inaugural issue, Who Gets to Write?, the editors convened a roundtable on the topic of how architecture is communicated to the public, bringing together perspectives from design practice, journalism, and academia. 

Writing shapes the way architecture is understood internally by architects, and externally by the public. Historically, the tools required for writing—time, vocabulary, and space for reflection—have been available only to a narrow subset of people. The old adage that history is written by the victors plays itself out daily in practice and the academy: The distribution of wealth and leisure under late-stage capitalism determines who among us has the time and bandwidth to put pen to paper.

Editors Pouya Khadem and Sebastián López Cardozo moderated the following discussion with Scott Colman, Brittany Utting, and Sydney Shilling on the state of writing (and reading) in architecture, and the growing distance between our discipline and the public. (This roundtable has been edited for length and content.)

Sebastián López Cardozo (SLC): Who gets to write? Do certain people have more access to the act of writing than others? Who gets to shape architectural discourse today, and what resources are needed to do so?

Scott Colman (SC): It's a big question. People don't have time to write because they're often laboring for low money for long hours. Writing, as a mode of reflection on architectural design, used to be fundamental to architecture practice—at least in the western tradition. Because of capital and its structuring division of labor, the distinction between specialists within the discipline has been growing; all of the labels that we have for what people do—theorist, historian, academic, practitioner …—are products of that system. In the current system of design practice, we're structurally inhibited from having this kind of reflection—we are restricted to specialized roles, and we have little room to reflect. To have time and space for these reflections would lead us to question the system. So, the question of "who gets to write?" is as much a political question as a structural one.

So, in a way, your setup is an effort to find ways to hack the system. Now, the only way we get to consciously engage the politics of design is to do it on our own time with our own dime, using any surplus means, or any surreptitious communication tools we have. I'm one of those privileged people who have been given the opportunity to be able to spend at least part of my time writing. And so I have an enormous responsibility that I should feel more often than I probably do.

Brittany Utting (BU): The question asked for this panel is: “Who gets to write?” You could have asked “Who has to write? Who needs to write? Who doesn't write? Who won't write?” It’s important to unpack the implications of your phrasing, and what audiences it includes and excludes. More traditional forms of architectural writing typically take place in sites of “sanctioned” discourse: journals, magazines, and books. Increasingly, however, alternative formats of exchange are emerging: activist letter writing, open-source curricula, and even satirical memes. These different practices of writing have the potential to expand the notions of audience and authorship, but they also participate in a complex system of labor relations and exchanges that themselves aren’t free from exploitation.

Sydney Shilling (SS): It's important to mark the distinction between shaping the discourse and writing, because I don't think we can say that the discourse is only happening in publication. For instance, look at @fa.front and @architectural.workers.united on Instagram—the grassroots movements they have created are impactful, started through their own agency with virtually no resources. They didn't rely on traditional outlets to give them permission or to publish. Social media platforms, despite all their flaws, have in many ways democratized the conversation. In today’s saturated media landscape, it is an absolute privilege to have an audience, but as far as the privilege of being able to write is concerned, writing is as accessible as it has ever been. And in fact, the architectural worker is the ideal architectural writer, because they have a facility of language with which to discuss projects that is rare within the broader field of journalism.

SC: In the history of western architecture, this kind of architectural writing—what we call architectural criticism—arose with the public sphere, alongside newspapers and other modes of more democratic communication. Architects were no longer beholden just to the nobility or to the church, but also to the public at large. And now there's a fundamental crisis in democratic discourse, as the space to reflect and criticize shrinks everyday—especially in the last thirty years or so—due to the structure of the market and the neoliberal system of value.

BU: The question of writing’s accessibility that Sydney refers to is an interesting one. For instance, short forms of writing are accessible because they can more easily fit into the frameworks of social media that are increasingly defining the public sphere. But these shorter formats can also have the effect of flattening discourse: reducing disciplinary arguments to a quick quip, an image, or a few hundred characters. Although those formats can expand discourse into visible sites that are more immediately political, they can also make longer forms of conversation and more nuanced exchanges impossible.

Pouya Khadem (PK): Scott brought up an interesting point about democratization. Is there a connection between more accessible language and democratization? Is the consumer-driven "accessibility" that happens under capitalism a function of reduced leisure time to read and think? 

SC: It's complicated. The distance between architectural discourse, criticism, practice, and the general public has never been as wide as it is now. As mentioned earlier, architectural criticism was synonymous with public discourse. Through newspapers, socialist journals, and even gatherings in union halls, critics, academics, and practitioners conveyed their thoughts through a language that was accessible to the public. But as the different parts of the discipline have more intensively specialized, a certain language has developed—inevitably—among the experts. As a result, the space for reflecting on architecture has shifted away from publicly accessible media to specialized forums.

SS:  It makes me wonder to what extent the journalist serves as translator between the architect and the public. Communication about built works have been increasingly taken over by firms’ marketing and public relations departments. But in order to connect readers and writers, we need authors who can speak about architecture in plain language. The needlessly academic jargon prevalent in architectural writing is a barrier to growing an audience outside the profession. This hinders the public’s ability to engage in this discourse in meaningful ways.

PK: Any business that relies on traffic for ad revenue benefits from an increase in consumers. News and media companies have broad access to complex tools and metrics, and can tune their content to attract more traffic. But as columnist David Carr wrote for the New York Times some years ago on the risks of traffic-hungry journalism, “just because something is popular does not make it worthy.” Under this business model, the project of making architecture more accessible (in its image and written form) risks entanglement with questions of marketability for advertisers, and pushes elements of social, economic, and environmental significance—what makes writing “worthy”—aside.

BU: This perhaps is the role that emerging forms of journalism can play: to create a public space for intellectual inquiry and debate that can happen independent of a market-based translation of architecture to consumers.

SLC: I see two aspects to the question of writing’s accessibility that seem to be at odds with one another. At the core, there is the ethically-rooted, journalistic mission to create a more informed public and deepen their appreciation and engagement with architecture. This mode of writing is more likely to embody Carr’s idea of what makes writing “worthy”… Yet, when ad-revenue weighs too heavily, readership numbers trump any notion of worthiness. The difficulty in challenging this second, traffic-driven mode of writing is that it is still about a certain idea of accessibility: It’s giving the majority of readers what they want to see.

SS: Everything comes at a price. The industry has to be able to sustain itself one way or another. It is a very delicate balance to find a way to support the business of writing financially, and not sacrifice journalistic integrity.

BU: That’s why these alternative writing practices are so critical. For example, projects such as AWW function outside of both the traditional systems of academic review as well as profit-driven models of journalism. Such projects are ground-up, edited by students and recent grads, supported by non-profit institutions, and don’t need to sell a minimum number of copies to break even. However, because such formats exist outside of a financial or academic market, the ideas produced in these journals typically rely on forms of labor that are unwaged. When asking the question “Who gets to write?” it’s critical to also acknowledge not only the different value systems and formats of exchange in publishing, but also how the labor of writing is often hidden in discourse.

SLC: Sydney, in your work as a journalist, I know you're quite interested in this notion that there is a gatekeeping of architectural discourse through language—for example, through the way architects use internal, academic jargon that is often inaccessible and requires a certain level of education to access.

SS: I think that the question of accessibility is a difficult one, but architectural writing, and in particular academic writing, tends to be written for an academic audience. If we allow academia to become the only voice and agent to shape the discourse, we'll shrink the discipline into an echo chamber, where only those who have the luxury to read will have the luxury to write, and vice versa. In that scenario, what happens to the perspectives and voices outside of academia that don't necessarily have the resources to contribute to the conversation? There are not enough outlets talking about architecture in plain language that the public can easily understand, and this prevents the public from engaging with issues within the built environment.

BU: It's provocative to think about how we can write for non-architects—not as future clients, but as co-participants in the public sphere. Most design magazines cater to a wealthy clientele while many architectural journals are limited to only academic audiences. Far fewer platforms support writing for a public that focuses on the inequities embedded in the built environment—architects writing for and with their communities as they negotiate the political, environmental, and financial conditions of design.

SLC: Since 2020, we’ve seen a shift within the architecture community’s attitude—a willingness and urgency to engage with issues of labor, the Western-centric pedagogy, privilege, systemic racism, and more. I think all of us at AWW have felt that there has also been a renewed interest and appreciation for different forms of writing or expression, like memes and social media platforms. Maybe Sydney can share her experience writing an article on architectural workers’ unionization efforts. Would this have happened before 2020?

SS: That conversation probably could not have happened five years ago. I think that the pandemic necessitated a change in perspective. Many of these issues could no longer be ignored—priorities changed. I was seeing conversations about architectural labor (which had already been happening, albeit mostly in private) unfold on social media, and I thought about how to best translate these conversations to an architecture audience, and to spotlight the impact of the grassroots work. It was a challenging issue to cover, especially at a magazine where the majority of our readership consists of practitioners. But the industry seemed ready to confront these difficult conversations.

BU: Why wasn't this type of content being reported to wider audiences beforehand? Efforts addressing the issues of architectural labor have been going on for years. And so it’s interesting that it was only after the social and health stress of the pandemic and the immense pressure exerted by the Black Lives Matter movement that those issues got the traction to be discussed more broadly in the profession—and that they were actually implemented in firms across the world.

SS: Critical mass was really important in publishing stories like this because there is an inherent risk in publishing content that is, in some ways, critical of your audience. At the same time, we want to create relevant and valuable content, which is why it's so important that these issues are publicized to a wider audience. Until recently, the public really had no idea what it takes to produce a building. As a society, it's difficult to know what you value if you don't understand the invisible labor behind these projects. People are starting to acknowledge what the reality is, and this will enable people to advocate for change.

SC: There was an essay written by Sylvia Lavin maybe 15 years ago, called “Conversations Over Cocktails.” Its thesis was that written architectural discourse had died and the academic discourse of architecture was happening “over cocktails.” The obvious implication is that a society organized through verbal discourse is a society in which power operates behind the scenes as opposed to out in the open. These things are absolutely connected. There may be a thousand million tweets every second, but the way the world is actually being reorganized is through a series of very tight, specialized, increasingly privatized conversations.

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Scott Colman is an Assistant Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture.

Sydney Shilling is the Assistant Editor of Azure Magazine, an international publication with a focus on contemporary architecture and design.

Brittany Utting is an Assistant Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture and co-director of the research and design collective HOME-OFFICE.

Pouya Khadem edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Houston.

Sebastián López Cardozo edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Toronto and is a frequent contributor at the New York Review of Architecture.

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>>Who Gets to Write?