In the Spring Semester 2021 Keynote Lectures investigated contemporary formats of architectural communication and (re-)presentation. Current magazines on architecture seem either to focus on a specific disciplinary audience by using a particular academic language that is only comprehensible to them or merely to promote a lifestyle by addressing contemporary trends in architectural design for a wider audience.

While intellectual and scientific architecture journals seem to stay within their own discipline most of the time and often fail to communicate their issues of architecture and space in plain, comprehensible language in order to engage a wider audience, typical architectural lifestyle magazines address mass culture from a broader perspective. They are made for the moment and show a trend but are also volatile, immediate and informal. They even have permission to stay superficial, since they are intended to entertain and stimulate the reader by using language that is easy to read.

In the Spring Semester 2021 the students have bene editing an ‘intellectual lifestyle magazine’ on architecture that interweaved the depth of a scholarly journal with the superficiality and ease of a lifestyle magazine. The product had to be an architecture magazine on holiday: architecture for the insert of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ).

Six editors with different backgrounds in the making of a magazine – from lifestyle magazine to professional journal – each directed a one-day workshop session. They conveyed their expertise in lectures and coaching sessions, each building up on the other, focusing on different aspects of the production of a magazine.

Fri, 5.3.2021
Werk Bauen und Wohnen
Roland Züger, Zurich
How to find an editorial concept & write the table of contents.

Fri, 12.3.2021
OASE Magazine
Asli Ciçek, Brussels
How to write and visualize an editorial.

Fri, 19.3.21
trans magazin – ETH Zürich
How to write a text that the audience likes to read.

Fri, 16.4.21
The Funambulist
Léopold Lambert, Paris
How to edit contents.

Fri, 30.4.21
AD Magazine
Lena Schimmelbusch, Rome
How to illustrate lifestyle content.

Fri, 7.5.21
NZZ Magazin
Rike Hug, Zurich
How to put everything together.

Student works

Cabin Fever – Holidays behind their hashtags

Hilke Horsthemke, Jacopo Ruggeri, Rinor Rushiti, Vlada Elizarova, Róisín Purkis

Switzerland on a budget

Zouhir Bakir, Pavla Nesvadbíková, Qendrim Gashi, Emelyn Vicencio, Shane Lounibos