Clip/Stamp/Fold 6

An explosion of architectural little magazines in the 1960s and 1970s instigated a radical transformation in architectural culture, in which the architecture of the magazines vied with buildings as the site of innovation and debate. Clip/Stamp/Fold 6: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X takes stock of over seventy little magazines from this period, which were published in over a dozen cities. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term "little magazine" is not taken at face value. In addition to short-lived, radical magazines, Clip/Stamp/Fold 6 includes pamphlets and building instruction manuals as well as professional magazines that experienced "moments of littleness," influenced by the graphics and intellectual concerns of their self-published contemporaries.

Clip/Stamp/Fold 6 explores the vastness and heterogeneity of this remarkable explosion of independent architectural publishing in the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition's annotated timeline serves as a cross-section tracking the progression and the transformations of little magazines through the design of their covers. A selection of original magazines, sourced locally, surveys the variety of unique formats, re-introducing rare examples from private collections. Forty-four vintage architectural magazines were collected from Vancouver architects and artists for the sixth presentation of Clip/Stamp/Fold 6 at the Contemporary Art Gallery, and are expanded by complete facsimiles for visitors to browse. Audio interviews with editors and designers of these publications punctuate the room, arid transcriptions of parts of these interviews appear in the newsletter. In addition, many of these editors and designers were invited to respond to the exhibition through a series of Little Magazines/Small Talks events held at the various venues. Selections of these discussions are presented in the gallery in DVD form. An implicit aim of the exhibition is to invite reflection on contemporary uses of media in architecture. Assembling all these remarkable documents for the first time offers a unique view of a key period of architectural innovation and challenges today's architects to provoke a similar intensity.

The exhibition has been a collaborative research and design project by a team of PhD candidates at the School of Architecture at Princeton University led by Professor Beatriz Colomina and is the outcome of two years of seminars, interviews and visits with the editors, architects and theorists who produced the magazines. The project team includes Craig Buckley, Anthony Fontenot, Urtzi Grau, Lisa Hsieh, Alicia lmperiale, Lydia Kallipoliti, Olympia Kazi, Daniel Lopez-Perez, and Irene Sunwoo. The exhibition began in 2006 at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, and has traveled to the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; Documenta 12, (where it was part of the Archplus exhibition The Making of your Magazines), the Architectural Association, London; and most recently at the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture, Oslo.

For Clip/Stamp/Fold 6, the CAG has organized a programme of talks, inviting architects, writers and publishers from the region to respond to the exhibition, including a lecture by the curator Beatriz Colomina.

Guest curated by Beatriz Colomina