DAD - Department of Architecture and Design

The article reflects on a pedagogical project conducted in the framework of the History and Theory course at Politecnico di Milano and questions the value of architectural journals as sources, instruments, methods, and narrative devices for the teaching of architectural history, probing their role as mediators with multifaceted networks of professional, intellectual, and institutional milieux involved in the production of architectural knowledge. The study was conducted on a corpus of around fifty periodicals addressed as a “system of knowledge”, crossing diverse genres and generations of journals, and questioning their character of “complex social objects” to be investigated in their material, economic, cultural, and visual dimensions. On the one hand, the method combining “journal biographies” with the decoding of the issues through the analysis of all their structuring parts allows questioning the changing notion of milieu that magazines contribute to creating over time, revealing the interrelations between a constellation of agents - editors, owners, institutions, and audience – with their divergent agendas, rationalities, and editorial strategies. On the other hand, the paper reflects on the significance of analyzing journals in their interconnections, as cross-cultural and comparative readings offer a more nuanced understanding of the times and forms of production of architectural culture as a transnational practice, challenging the canonical interpretations and time frames of a 20th-century architectural history still centered on the European and North American editorial scene.