Land Matters: The Death and Life of Great Design Magazines
In a preview of January's Land Matters column, Landscape Architecture magazine editor Bill Thompson, FASLA, discusses the demise and birth of design magazines, and asks, "What qualities make a design magazine deserve to survive?"

What factors enable a design magazine to survive in today’s publishing environment? What qualities make a design magazine deserve to survive?

Those questions are timely given the recent demise of Architecture. Few, I suspect, will shed tears over the death of that lackluster (in its last incarnation) publication, but when any national design magazine bites the dust, one can’t help but stop and reflect on what that means for related publications. It could be argued that in Architecture we have a case of a magazine that didn’t survive because, editorially, it didn’t deserve to. But is survival generally based on a professional magazine’s editorial merits? The landscape architecture field suffered the loss of one of its own publications a couple of years back; did Land Forum deserve its early death?

Some magazines have the odds of survival seemingly stacked in their favor. The American Institute of Architects’ Architectural Record, for example, appears to be thriving based on its sponsorship by a professional association combined with a strong advertising base. As it happens, Landscape Architecture shares that same lucky combination, which probably means that its survival is assured at least for the near future. Such factors don’t speak, of course, to the question of whether these two magazines deserve to survive based on editorial merit. (I strongly feel LAM does, but I’m biased.)

Witold Rybczynski, writing in Slate (November 15, 2006), looks at big-picture trends among architecture magazines and suggests that some of the architecture magazines carried the seeds of their own destruction. As recently as the 1960s, the best architecture publications were based primarily on substantive text—specifically, on articles written by major practitioners such as Charles Moore and Philip Johnson. Then in the 1970s, design magazines began depending more and more on photography, especially glossy color photography. “There’s something about a color photograph that glamorizes its subject,” writes Rybczynski, “and architectural writers soon adopted the slightly breathless tones of fashion reporters.” This was in direct contradiction, of course, to any thoughtful criticism, which became scarcer and scarcer. Longtime LAM readers will note that some of the above comments could have been applied to LAM in years past—in fact, I have addressed this in previous editorials and hope that we have remedied the worst problem areas.

Architecture’s successor, titled Architect, proposes to take a different perspective on the field—to “portray architecture...not just as a succession of high-profile projects, glowingly photographed and critiqued, but as a technical and creative process,” according to its editor. If Architect can really illuminate the nuts and bolts of design, great. I haven’t read the first issue to judge, and the cover of the first issue makes me not want to bother. It looks like the same old syndrome of vanity photographs aimed at creating a new cadre of “starchitects”—more of the same celebrity “rah-rah” that we’ve been trying to phase out of LAM.

A final question: What additional magazines, if any, does the landscape architecture community need? Another high-fashion publication along the lines of Land Forum? From where I sit, the great need is for a rigorous nuts-and-bolts publication about the technical side of landscape architecture—in-depth discussions of the materials and methods of construction with plenty of “take home” information. There are models of these in related fields: Stormwater, Erosion Control, and especially Environmental Building News. Such a magazine would greatly enrich this profession, which could benefit from a magazine that promotes technical and ecological innovation.

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA
Editor/bthompson@asla.org