It’s hard to believe, but America’s first architectural broadsheet has published its 100th issue. Since our debut on November 10, 2003, our determination to deliver architects the news they need with speed and sophistication has only redoubled, along with our size and our staff. With an eye on the central place that British weeklies such as Building Design hold in the architectural discourse over there, we wanted to address the immediate interests and concerns of practitioners in New York with news that was quick, on-the-spot, and opinionated.
One of the reasons we’ve grown and changed is that the architecture community has also undergone a transformation. In our first 16-page issue, we pointed out that while “barely a day passes that a design-related WTC story does not appear in the local press…little other architecture news is reported in general.” Five years ago, Ground Zero and the politics surrounding it were daily preoccupations for many in the field; we wanted to broaden the conversation. Since then, we’ve covered the dramatic impact of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s neighborhood rezonings, and the struggles over the biggest projects the city has seen in decades, from the Atlantic Yards to Hudson Yards. We looked at the towers that have sprung up on seemingly every available site, and talked to the architects who designed them and the developers who created them. We’ve interviewed icons like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and introduced you to tomorrow’s stars.
While the city’s architecture community and its concerns will keep on evolving, we believe this is still true: “This community is not easy to pin down, we recognize. As all other industries clearly understand, a timely, reliable news source can be crucial to business as well as to fostering a healthy sense of community and competition.” Many of you agreed: Readers regularly tell us that AN fills a need that they didn’t know existed. Others tell us that we’ve helped forge a more cohesive and informed community of architects, designers, and urban planners, and that while they subscribe to other magazines and journals, it is ours that they actually read, cover to cover.
Our original intention to create a local news source quickly spread beyond city limits to encompass the entire Northeast. In 2006, we launched in California, and in the next year, we plan to be in the Midwest, too. We want to keep apace in meeting ever-higher expectations from readers and from ourselves. Today, we bring you news about projects, financing, practitioners, ideas—and of course gossip—across several platforms, including an enhanced website and a blog launched in September at the Venice Biennale.
Conversations with our readers have always been a crucial part of our process at AN, and they shape the news we put in every issue. We want your input and look forward to hear ing from you about the paper—its look, its content, its cultural coverage—and how we can better connect with the architectural community. So we hope you will join us in this celebration and in our mission to keep you at the very center of the loop. Over our first 100 issues, we’ve changed and grown along with the architecture community, and we’re looking forward to keeping up with even more!
