serial consign

If I haven't already made it clear, I am fascinated by newspapers. This interest extends beyond the discussions about the evolving business model of the industry and crowdsourced reporting that I often write about. What is so captivating about newspapers is that, as artifacts, they represent the crystallization of global flows of information. Every edition of a newspaper is a time capsule comprised of hundreds of stories stitched together into a composite narrative. There is something uncanny about the way that stories from around the world are distributed across the columns, pages, and sections of paper space. Marshall McLuhan quipped that if you removed the dateline from a paper it would read as an "exotic and fascinating surrealist poem."

[nancy chunn / new york times front page / april 22, 1996]

In 1996 the American artist Nancy Chunn conducted an extremely thorough exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of the front page. For the entire year she used the front page of the New York Times as a diary, annotating the news of the each day with her own commentary and graphics. Each of Chunn's interventions superimposed illustrated iconography on top of the text while responding to the columnar layout of the page. In an interview with Gary Indiana she described her interest with the Times as follows:

The thing I love about the Times is the variety of stuff that appears on the front page. In some funny way, if you read the paper from cover to cover, it’s a daily map of the world; the front page is a map of what’s important that day -- or what was important the day before, actually. And that’s saying a lot. It’s not only economics, it’s not only politics, it’s not only sports. You get the world, you get the nation, you get the local, you get the extraterrestrial.

It is interesting to view these works chronologically as Chunn developed her own personal rhythm, colour coding and graphic standards based off the news trends that year. The entire Front Pages project was archived in a beautiful text (designed by Lisa Feldman) that was honoured by the AIGA as one of top book designs of 1997.

[los angeles times front page for june 6th 1968 & analytic diagram]

I discovered Chunn's project about halfway through my own mapping of the history of the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Despite the fact my work was of an altogether different tone, I found Chunn's rigor and sense of humour inspiring. I've been working on developing a much more involved system of time-based media mapping for deployment in 2008.

[austin kleon / texas blackout suite part 2 (detail)]

Instead of notation, Austin Kleon's Texas Blackout Suite builds commentary through obscuring content. This project saw Kleon, the self-described "writer who draws," arm himself with a Sharpie marker and reveal latent poetry tucked away in the body text of headline news.

Earlier this year, Martin John Callanan launched a project called I Wanted to See All the News from Today which mines feeds from hundreds of newspapers from around the world and sets up an impressive array of front pages. There are moments within this work when a few adjacent papers feature some of the same content illustrating the permutational quality of how stories are explored in different nodes across a network of texts. This project explores the same territory as the Newseum's Today's Front Pages gateway but (in my opinion) towards much more interesting ends.

If the above links and projects have not satiated your appetite for news aesthetics take a look at Aleksandra Mir's playful illustration project Newsroom 1986-2000 and my post on visualizing the news from earlier this year.

[from left: walter gropius & adolf meyer, eliel saarinen, john mead howells and raymond hood / chicago tribune tower competition entries / 1934]

Through my thesis research I developed a keen interest in the evolution of the the newspaper administration facility over the 20th century. There is a definite tendency for newspaper headquarters to have an iconic presence in the downtown core in modern cities, one only need look to New York, Chicago or Los Angeles to see this. The elevations of these structures provided a key surface through which to advertise the newspaper as a protagonist in the city. Quite often the newspapers' banner is writ large on the side of the building. Given these observations about the newspaper and the city, how is this relationship changing during the retooling of the news industry? In this age of distributed creativity, does the newspaper need to assert a visible presence in the city?

This post is a brief genealogy of newspaper administration facilities, spanning from 1924 through the present. It catalogs the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Times and a proposed headquarters for the Pravda daily designed shortly after the Bolshevik revolution. In discussing these projects one can get a unique perspective on the role the newspaper has played in the city throughout the 20th century and perhaps help us speculate about the future.

The Pravda Tower was designed as a headquarters for the influential Soviet Daily, which was at one point the most read newspaper in the world. Brothers and cultural cognoscenti Leonid, Viktor, and Aleksandr Vesnin were actively involved with the constructivist movement from its inception, and amongst the vanguard of designers and artists after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Their 1924 design for Pravda’s administrative headquarters called for a slender, transparent tower which aimed to explore the possibilities of structural steel as well as display the operation of the paper to the populace. This transparent facade was desirable to a culture that drew no distinction between the people and governance; the populace could see “behind the scenes” and view daily newspaper operation.

The structure can be considered a direct descendent of Vladimir Tatlin’s proposed Monument to the Third International tower that was proposed in 1919 as a headquarters for the Communist International. Tatlin’s tower was also comprised of structural steel, and it reached triumphantly into the sky. Where Tatlin’s tower was planned as being 400 metres in height, and was peaked by an information centre which issued updates via telegraph, radio, loudspeaker, and projection onto the clouds, the Pravda tower was rather grounded in comparison. The Pravda tower also evokes the image of El Lissitzky’s 1920 Lenin Tribute.

The building is extremely simple in plan; providing an open office for each of the buildings six stories. The footprint of the building is quite small, (about 81 square metres) plus a circulation core that houses a stairwell and elevator. It is ironic that a Soviet newspaper headquarters, the "voice of the people," would separate production from administration and editorial departments as these were still often housed under the same roof in America at the time. One can only assume that the Pravda Tower is to be read in the same light as Tatlin and El Lissitsky’s monumental structures, as figureheads of ideology rather then strictly utilitarian constructions.

On June 9, 1922 the American Institute of Architects held the final banquet of its annual Convention. President Henry H. Kendall rose to close the proceedings with the announcement that the Chicago Tribune Company planned to hold an international competition for the design of the skyscraper that would serve as its new headquarters. The Tribune company had amassed $100,000 in awards for the competition and asked for no less then “the world’s most beautiful office building” to affirm its role as a great American corporation. More then 250 architects from around the world participated in the competition and the team of John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood won the competition with a design that spoke more to a gothic revival then the nascent international style.

So why did the Chicago Tribune company, a technologically savvy, forward thinking organization select Howells and Hood’s entry considering their project’s utilization of dated European typologies instead of more progressive schemes from Walter Gropius & Adolf Meyer and Eliel Saarinen?

Gropius and Meyer proposed a reimagination of the skyscraper as an asymmetrical entity with heightened structural transparency and an interest in registering individual offices as homogenous nodes. The most interesting aspect of this proposal was the fusion of the administrative building with the four story printing plant, which juts out of the rear of the tower.

Eliel Saarinen’s design is widely considered one of the most influential skyscraper projects that was never built. Saarinen’s key innovation was a graceful implementation of telescoping volumes, each further set back from the ground plane footprint of the building. Although Saarinen did not win the competition, his competition entry was widely attributed for opening American architects' eyes to the elimination of standard tall building tropes of the time (many of which are found in the Howells/Hood entry).

Despite its cornices, ornamentation, and unimpeded vertical ascent and the presence of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright's work, the Tribune company went with Howells and Hood proposal. It is interesting to footnote this period in American architecture, the era of “cathedrals of commerce” as needing to wrap new structures with historical references. Regardless of the outcome, the Tribune competition was a lightning rod in tall building design and corporate branding.

The headquarters of the Los Angeles Times was designed by Gordon B. Kaufman, and built in 1935. In the same year, the building was awarded a gold medal at the 1937 Paris Exposition for its “Moderne architectural style.” Like the administration and management of the Times, the building has been a constant state of flux throughout its history. Over the decades the Times has acquired adjacent buildings (or commissioned their construction) and the complex is now attached to five other buildings occupying an entire city block. Not all of this space is dedicated to administration of the daily, some of it is leased out for commercial purposes. The Los Angeles Times has a particularly complicated architectural history as the original Times headquarters was bombed in 1910 in the escalating battle between publisher Harrison Gray Otis and organized labour.

In 2001 the New York Times, the daily newspaper of record in America, announced that it intended to build a new headquarters to replace its current base of operations. A competition was held and Renzo Piano’s entry, a collaboration with NYC based Fox and Fowle Architects, was selected to be constructed. Piano’s proposal is elegant and understated. Apparently inspired by the simplicity and clarity of the Manhattan street grid, much attention has been devoted to the façade system and internal daylighting as well as considering how the building will integrate with the New York skyline.

The building’s signature feature is its double paned glass curtain wall and accompanying scrim. The scrim is comprised of thin horizontal ceramic tubes mounted on a steel framework which sits extended out from the curtain wall by 600 mm. The primary purpose of this screen system is to limit thermal gain from direct sunlight, but this system also will reflect light into the building to improve daylighting. The tubes will also reflect light back at the city, creating an “ambient” façade the color and hue of which changes depending on the time of day, season, and weather conditions.

The tall building typology is particularly appropriate for the density of downtown Manhattan as is the inclusion of commercial office space within the building program. The Times building was occupied this past June and the construction was documented by photographer Annie Leibovitz.

One of the common threads that runs through the programs of all of these buildings is the significant lack of public space. If the news industry is beginning to aknowledge the need to engage and interact with readers and looking to the blogosphere and social media for inspiration, at what point will this result in a new media architecture? What will space of future news production feel like? Two interesting precidents are Polshek Partnership's Newseum and the Diller Scofidio Renfro's incredible scheme for the Eyebeam Museum ideas competition. Neither of these buildings were intended for news production, but both speak to the the evolving relationship between curating and interacting with information and media.