Slow Media: Architecture histories of, from, and through architecture magazines

This essay identifies and defines three modes of writing architecture histories: of, from, and through architecture magazines. It focuses on the second mode and argues that by using 'slow media' to develop architecture histories from the back issues of printed architecture magazines, it is possible to re-activate the agency they originally had in architectural discourse. The essay then looks at several texts that the Smithsons published in Architectural Design magazine in 1965 and by emphasising the mode of writing history from architecture magazines, it shows how their Brutalist thinking developed during the decade between Hunstanton School and the Economist Cluster.