Redlines is a collection of interviews with editors that make today's most provocative architectural publications come to life. While architecture is traditionally concerned with buildings, materials, and scale, their importance and historical impact are recorded through words, books, and images that are often organized, published, and disseminated. Redlines seeks to understand the pedagogical and design frameworks that shape this process.
In this session, we look at SOILED; Co-founded by architect Joseph Altshuler and performance artist Isaac Bloom, SOILED was conceived upon a simple observation: even though architecture is all around us, architecture lacks an accessible venue for public consumption and entertainment.
What is the history of the publication? What does it focus on?
SOILED was born in 2010. Co-founded by architect Joseph Altshuler and performance artist Isaac Bloom, SOILED was conceived upon a simple observation: even though architecture is all around us, architecture lacks an accessible venue for public consumption and entertainment. Without a proscenium, frame, or screen to contain it, the stuff of architecture is presumed to manifest the “real,” obscuring the fictional constitution of its construction that would otherwise align the discipline with other forms of cultural practice like film, fashion, and literature. SOILED provides a “ticket” to an architectural show that invites initiated practitioners and extra-disciplinary fans into an expansive world of architectural ideas.
...even though architecture is all around us, architecture lacks an accessible venue for public consumption and entertainment.
Specifically, SOILED is a mashup of a literary journal and a design magazine. It narrates a playfully sincere and seriously humorous exploration of oft-overlooked dimensions of our built environment. Acting as a kind of cultural matchmaker, SOILED pairs previously unaffiliated writers and architects, initiating new writing and drawings to share paper space in unexpected and engaging ways. We believe that by intensifying the fictive and storytelling potential in architecture, we might engage a broader public in architectural ideas from discourse to action.
Who runs the publication? How are the editors organized?
SOILED is produced by a multi-disciplinary Chicago-based team comprised of architect and educator Joseph Altshuler, graphic designer Matthew Harlan, and writer Hollen Reischer. We’re also supported by our fantastic intern Mariel Tishma. While we each bring specific disciplinary background and expertise to the table, we take pleasure in trading hats extensively throughout the production process. And rather than offering a traditional “letter from the editor,” we insert our explicit editorial voices intermittently throughout each issue with a series of mini-essays or cut-out ephemera that articulate thematic chapter headings to set the tone for groupings of content from external contributors.
...rather than offering a traditional “letter from the editor,” we insert our explicit editorial voices intermittently throughout each issue with a series of mini-essays or cut-out ephemera...
How are the issues constructed?
Each issue of SOILED focuses on a specific systemic lens by which to probe and narrate the built environment. For example, Skinscrapers tells stories about the built environment through the lens of the human body, Platescrapers via food culture, and Deathscrapers via death culture. For us, “scraping” is shorthand for “digging into spatial narratives.” Each issue doesn’t so much signify a theme, but rather provides a specific bias for looking at and thinking about spatial relationships in the world.
Each issue combines specifically commissioned content with unsolicited content selected from our open call for submissions. Most articles are constructed as a pairing of a non-architect writer (including essayists, poets, fiction writers, etc.) and a trained architect. Often the architectural or visual content will come first, inviting the writer to respond with narrative entry points, interviews, flash fictions, or character studies that begin to populate the architect’s drawn worlds.
Often the architectural or visual content will come first, inviting the writer to respond with narrative entry points, interviews, flash fictions, or character studies...
For example, in our recent issue, No. 7 – Animatescrapers, the architect Andrew Schachman contributed a series of drawings that delineate the city’s plumbing infrastructure, fixtures, and water users devoid of any building enclosures. The drawing articulates the equalizing and un-equalizing politics of plumbing systems as well as the invisible pleasures of running water. In turn, we invited the poet Kevin Coval to write a series of short poems that give voice to the water fixtures themselves, projecting an animate subjectivity onto ubiquitous plumbing objects.
For another example, in issue No. 6 – Deathscrapers, we asked an architectural designer to draw a series of speculative “Rooms to Die In” that tease out a variety of spatial, affectual, and functional qualities that might prove relevant to positioning a deathbed for oneself or a loved one. In turn, we’ve invited a practicing architect and a palliative care doctor to respond via a conversational written narrative, using their expertise in design and medicine to unpack and elaborate upon the drawn environments.
Is there any other medium to it but the printed object?
Each issue of SOILED is accompanied by a live cultural event that features interactive exhibits and installations related to the print content. For example, as part of the Deathscrapers exhibit, we invited the public to draw their own rooms to die in alongside the drawings featured in the issue.
How often is it released?
SOILED is released approximately once per year.
What is the long-term goal of the publication?
SOILED aims to advance the techniques and possibilities for architectural storytelling as its own genre. While “storytelling” may be a buzz word that is casually thrown around by architects and other creative practitioners, we are interested in exploring specific tropes of storytelling while applying them to directly architectural content. We hope to use our voice to usher in an era of more intentional, pleasurable, and entertaining architectural communication.
What weaknesses does the publication have?
SOILED is an independent endeavor produced by an all-volunteer staff. Without any institutional backing or consistent sponsorship, the funding of our work is precarious, and this sometimes prevents us from keeping a steady and periodic schedule of release dates. Uncertain release dates sometimes negatively impact the frequency and momentum of our work.
What is the role of publications today?
We believe that the proliferation of digital media counterintuitively renders print publications more relevant than ever before. Print publication today must offer new kinds of engagement beyond what digital platforms can offer. In our case, we leverage the physical and material specificities of the printed page to amplify content and tone of voice. Starting with issue #4, each issue is printed in two colors rather than full color. The limited but emphatic color palette enables diverse content from different contributors to initiate more intimate relationships in their pairings, and the emphasis on specific pigments prompts affectual and tactile response that would not be possible with pixels.
...we leverage the physical and material specificities of the printed page to amplify content and tone of voice. Starting with issue #4, each issue is printed in two colors rather than full color.
What is the most recent issue focused on?
Our most recent issue, No. 7 – Animatescrapers expands architecture’s subjectivity. Architecture is historically conceptualized as fixed, stationary, and inert. Alongside discussions that restrict subjectivity to humans, architectural discourse often positions buildings and cities as inanimate objects that might be operated on by exclusively human actors. However, in today’s world, houses speak in first person via social media, caricatures of buildings stand in for complex forces of gentrification, and components of the built environment play the role of lead and supporting actors in films, theatre, and literature. This issue of SOILED tells stories that amplify architecture’s position as an animate actor—a companion to humans and nonhumans with its own representational, material, and ontological agency in the world.
Anthony Morey is a Los Angeles based designer, curator, educator, and lecturer of experimental methods of art, design and architectural biases. Morey concentrates in the formulation and fostering of new modes of disciplinary engagement, public dissemination, and cultural cultivation. Morey is the ...
1 Comment
The word “redline” always grabs a person's attention. We weren't expecting this to be a collection of interviews of editors of architectural publications. This interview with the editors of SOILED have us looking at “scrapers” in an entirely new way.
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