Abstract and concrete
This rhetoric must now sound quaint and anachronistic to a generation cross-linked at the atomic level to printed circuitry. Yet without this hiccup in the face of the inevitable, the midcentury modern architecture that is now overvalued real estate would never have existed. The making of spaciousness in small spaces, the transformation of light into substance, the use of steel to make structures disappear into landscape -- and plenty else that continues to give Modernism an audience -- springs as much from beliefs about human nature as from a pure abstract aesthetic. They informed each other, and neither stood alone.
None of this is to understate the visual beauty of Arts & Architecture. Month after month, year after year, the covers were tantalizing -- outsized postcards from the cutting edge of design. Shaped largely by Follis, Matter and Alvin Lustig, the imagery had the energy of Russian Constructivist prints. Since the only text was the Arts & Architecture logo, with the month and year embedded into the drawing, the covers were like swatches of wallpaper: pure line and color, pattern and chaos. Invariably abstract and making no reference to the content within, the graphics are animated and urgent, as if too much matter had to be compressed into a single frame.
Yet that only suited the magazine's contents. Entenza never pretended to have any answers to the riddle of the single-family residence, and the experimental, often whimsical artwork on the cover reflected the problem of working out what, expressly, Modernism stood for.
In a single issue, one might find Jan de Swart describing the use of a finely tuned band saw to slice blocks of wood into hollow and interlocking sculptures about "space and volume, line and shadow," Marcel Breuer weighing in on the false dichotomy of man and machine ("Sullivan didn't eat his functionalism as he cooked it," he reminded readers, "Corbusier didn't build his machine for living") and Gregory Ain outlining plans for 100 inexpensive houses for returning World War II "average veterans" -- his economical Mar Vista houses that no returning Iraq war vet could possibly afford.
A time capsule
This facsimile edition of Arts & Architecture has been done in an unusual fashion. Instead of bound annuals, or a stupendous anthology, every issue has been individually reprinted. Leafing through, you get something akin to the original experience of encountering the magazine when it arrived by second-class mail or on the newsstand. (On the back cover of a few issues, there is an address label for "Mr. Julius Shulman," as if to prove the authenticity of the reprint.)
This kind of faithful reproduction -- so disastrous in architecture itself -- reanimates the provisional quality of Entenza's work. Nowadays, Modernism is a commodity. In the pages of the reprinted Arts & Architecture, none of the ideas or images seems quite so fixed. Modernism has a bit of its incipient, and radical, energy restored.
