Re: Design Book Review (1983–2002)
In the summer of 2018, I learned from David Eifler, the librarian at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, that Design Book Review, the quarterly that Laurie Snowden and I founded in 1983, was digitized in its entirety by Google and placed behind a firewall administered by the Hathi Trust. Eifler also told me how it could be made accessible. I forwarded this information to David Meckel at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco — the person there with whom Laurie and I negotiated our gift of the journal in 2000. Meckel sent it to others, including Keith Krumwiede, CCA’s new architecture dean. He wrote back immediately: “I can’t believe we own this!” At that moment, the stars finally aligned, bringing DBR back from the dead.
An event on 17 April 2019 at the Curatorial Research Bureau, part of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, marked CCA’s launch of the digital archive. Now CCA Professor William Littman has given that archive a better portal. Looking ahead, CCA is planning symposia around DBR that I’m hopeful will involve the editors when Laurie and I owned and published it: Richard Ingersoll and Cathy Lang Ho. They were a remarkable duo!
In preparation for the CCA launch event, Laurie and CCA’s Littman put some questions together for which I wrote a response. Here it is:
Why did you opt for an inclusive rather than a selective approach to design books?
One impetus for starting DBR was the volume of design-related titles in the early 1980s, of which a considerable part were aimed at practitioners. As we imagined our audience as literate professionals, we felt we should also cover books aimed at them. Over time we became more and more selective, both to counter what we saw as a lowering of standards by some publishers and to keep the issues at a manageable size. We also wanted to cover design broadly — not just architecture, but all the design fields. This reflected the ideals of Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, which at the time had exiled its Design Department to Davis. Design Professor Frances Butler was an early DBR contributor, so we were aware of this and opposed to it.
What were your major dilemmas or controversies?
We took some heat for issues on the John Hancock Tower in Chicago and the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, part of Richard’s “Buildings in Mid-Career” series. Some saw them as a sell-out, but both issues have held up. An interview with Bruce Graham on Hancock was unintentionally funny, a bit like Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal. Our reexamination of postwar modernist icons, also including the Ford Foundation and the Kimbell, coincided with the postmodernist and deconstructionist work and polemics then emerging.
What determined the character of the magazine?
Editorially, Richard had a strong, lasting influence. Shaping and reshaping DBR was a collective effort, but Richard was able to connect ideas to people. He constantly came up with innovative themes and features. Early on, Mark Rakatansky also helped us by enlisting contributors outside the Bay Area.
Gordon Chun gave DBR a robust template that allowed for any number of departures, but gave us a fallback for issues without themes and for the many reviews that fell into categories. Gordon invited Zuzana Licko to design the feature wells of several issues — work that is immediately identifiable as hers, and yet fits easily with the rest. Just as we were exceptionally lucky to have Richard as our founding editor and later to have Cathy as his co-editor, we were very fortunate to start out with Gordon. Graphic designer Betty Ho, Cathy’s sister, art-directed and designed the issues from 1993 to 1999. (Lucille Tenazas did the cover of the “Home” issue, our last before CCA took over. Yingzhao Li worked on CCA’s first issue before CCA took it over. Lucille then redesigned DBR, setting a new look for CCA’s issues.)
To what do you attribute DBR’s longevity?
Our early losses were staggering, so we focused on getting it to breakeven. We ran it on a shoestring. Noticing that our newsstand sales often converted to subscriptions, we hired a Berkeley undergraduate to call bookstores, asking them to stock it. We ended up with a network of some 450 bookstores, plus distributors. One of them, which sold to Waldenbooks, was a goldmine while it was in operation. Our newsstand sales were substantially higher than our paid subscriptions. Our paid circulation was around 4,800 copies per issue.
Thanks to Laurie’s sister, Kathy Snowden, we had ad sales from the outset — and some remarkably loyal advertisers. We also had multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation. At different points, Bud Knapp, founder of Architectural Digest, Dennis Cahill, publisher of Architecture, and Hans-Peter Thür, head of the Swiss publisher Birkhäuser, all expressed interest in buying DBR, but none of them followed through. MIT Press co-published DBR in the 1990s, an arrangement that ended messily. We did one issue on our own in 1999, then CCA took over. That’s the fiscal and operational side of the story—we did whatever we had to do to keep it going. But another answer is that we produced one great issue after another, constantly rethinking the content. And people kept reading.
What did you gain by being based in Berkeley?
Despite being seen from afar as a cottage production, DBR shared the cosmos with grander metropolises. As Lars Lerup observed at the time, Berkeley was “a suburb of New York.” Yet it was far enough away from Manhattan to be out of the fray of the often bitter feuds of that era. Our contributors were on both sides of various disputes, exempting us as a perceived neutral ground.
How did you decide on themes and special issues?
We constantly experimented. The ideas came from everywhere, but less from other magazines and journals, and more from events like Le Corbusier’s centenary and from the zeitgeist, to which Berkeley was attuned. People like John Loomis came to us, not only guest-editing their issues, but — as he did for “Other Americas” — raising money to pay for it (That issue won a national award from the AIA and had a lasting influence.) I think it helped that DBR was a book review and thus retrospective and anticipatory at once.
Were you influenced by other journals at the time?
The New York Review of Books was what we invoked if a contributor objected to being edited. We admired the AA Files and sometimes ran articles from Casabella that Richard translated. The Dutch journal Archis and another from Denmark caught our attention. Many of our UK contributors also wrote for Architectural Design (AD) and Architectural Review. Andrew Rabeneck, who’d been an editor at AD and taught at the AA, was very helpful in opening doors. (We owe an equal debt to influential early supporters like Spiro Kostof at Berkeley, Kenneth Frampton at Columbia, and Bill Moggridge at IDEO.)
What can younger people get from Design Book Review?
It documents two important decades in the history of design in an unusually thorough way, grounded in ideas and drawing on people in the different fields of design who were well positioned to comment. As a consciously “cultural” journal, it always “looked up” to ask what else was happening. Hence themes like “Post-Humanism” and a willingness to engage transitions like industrial design’s embrace of the tech industry and modernism’s dialectical passage through postmodernism and deconstructionism. It also gave its contributors the freedom to range — it had some truly wonderful writing, which we encouraged and gave sufficient room. As written discourse struggles to get its bearings among competing genres, DBR is here again as a precedent.
