In 1999, Birgit Lohmann and Massimo Mini co-founded designboom, self-proclaimed as the "first online architecture and design magazine." Seven years later, Facebook transitioned from Ivy League universities to massive audiences, while the first tweet was posted on formerly-known Twitter. Sixteen years have passed since these milestones.
While 16 years may be a short period in architecture, digital media and social networks are far from being considered emergent in the history of the internet. In fact, they form the core of the current Web 2.0 model, characterized by a dual interaction between content producers and consumers: sharing, liking, remixing, and reposting.
Indeed, the speed and magnitude of the transformations that digital media have undergone, and in turn, driven, provide the opportunity to begin documenting the history of the digital era and its impact on architecture.
What Is Architectural Communication?
Alongside Argentine architects Lisandro González and Jero Mullins, we developed "Comunicar Arquitectura 2020" (COMA 2020), a digital symposium in the midst of the pandemic where 16 Ibero-American specialists discussed their experiences in architectural communication. This included curator Ariadna Cantis, critic and writer Ethel Baraona, researcher Inés Moisset, editor Andrea Griborio, photographer Fede Cairoli, and activist Soledad Larraín.
For us, architectural communicators (comunicadores de arquitectura, in Spanish) are individuals who convey architectural knowledge and built production to a wider audience through diverse formats, from websites to podcasts, photography, and traditional editorial production.
However, architectural communication is not something new beyond the discipline. In fact, the literary genre of knowledge dissemination has thrived in science and humanities, especially since the emergence of the pandemic in 2020, as Spanish newspaper El Pais recently reported. Before that boom, there were already mainstream names like Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, and Yuval Noah Harari, just to name a few.
In a language such as Spanish, the scientific community already splits apart divulgación científica and difusión científica. According to Mexican scholar Lidia Girola Molina, scientific dissemination (divulgación científica) "involves a set of activities that make scientific knowledge accessible to the general public," while difusión científica "is an activity that aims to communicate scientific findings and debates to a specialized, although not necessarily specialist, audience on a particular subject."
So, if we understand architecture solely as the production of built works, architecture communicators are disseminators, while those editors, curators, and curators who participated in COMA 2020 are difusores (diffusers). However, if we understand architecture as a set of tools in which the construction of habitable works is just one possible practice, then both disseminators and diffusers can be considered architecture creators.
In both cases, architecture communicators can be the first contact for a mass audience with the discipline: they are the ones who best document and transmit architectural culture, expanding its reach and influence rather than limiting it.
Digital Architecture Curators: Origin and Consolidation
With the birth of the online content management system (CMS) Blogger in 1999, and, by extension, blogs, the Internet progressively eliminated certain entry barriers for new competitors in the publishing market. Large production and logistics chains were no longer required to create and distribute content through costly physical processes. Instead, it only required creating a free blog or, with enough experience, hosting it on WordPress to customize the design and scale its operations.
Without the economic or physical constraints of printed publications, the establishment of digital architecture media was correlated with the narrative of Web 1.0 and 2.0, with collaborative initiatives like Wikipedia: documenting and classifying universal knowledge, making it accessible to everyone with internet access.
Blogs offered the disruptive possibility of creating highly specific content for niche audiences, while free messaging tools allowed the creation of geographically decentralized work teams. Likewise, the consolidation of the post as the sole template for text and images on a static design website, along with an unprecedented direct relationship between the reader and the content, allowed the birth of the digital curator in architecture –the person who evaluates and selects architectural works for a constantly expanding digital database.
As a result, digital architecture media became a disruptive force in the early 21st century by: a) demonstrating a clearly superior publishing capacity compared to traditional publishers by bypassing physical production chains and associated costs; b) providing free and unlimited access to a continuously expanding database of architectural works to a global audience without the need for subscriptions, libraries, or physical publications; c) offering greater visibility to authors who chose to publish their architectural works on the internet rather than in traditional magazines.
At the same time, digital architecture media's shift from monthly to hourly publication schedules led to the belief that it lacked curatorial criteria, especially due to the absence of analysis for each selected work.
This was intentional because in-depth analysis, on the one hand, would be left to an audience that, in theory, could draw their own conclusions by having more and better information about the work
On the other hand, the production of analysis generates friction in the processes of scalability in Web 2.0, where immediacy is key: more is more.
However, since Google's search algorithms and social media algorithms began to prioritize the quality of response and engagement, respectively, over the most recent content, this logic became relatively obsolete.
A decade later, the genuine interest in massifying (democratizing, as it was called at the time) knowledge in the early 21st century did not consider how to cover the increasing production costs or how to deal with information overload and the systematic production of fake news to confuse and influence public opinion.
In conclusion, digital curators and, by extension, digital architecture media, have enriched the landscape of both works and geographic regions and cultural areas where good architecture can be found. They broke down the barriers of a cultural architectural elite that had been academically and media-reinforced by publications made by and about Europe and the United States. The history of 20th-century architecture revolved around them, as other techniques, histories, and seemingly valueless architectural works were sidelined according to their pedagogical models.
And while the amount of information available on the internet seems infinite and constantly expanding, digital curators can serve as a quality tollgate in an infinite digital ecosystem. It is certainly a less restrictive and finished tollgate than a selection of five monthly works in a printed magazine, but the idea that digital and analog are mutually exclusive is simply archaic.
Architecture News: Consolidation of A Format
With their own strengths and weaknesses, digital architecture media allowed unprecedented institutional, geographical, and academic decentralization in the history of the discipline.
However, as clear exercises in skeuomorphism, the first websites dedicated to architecture presented themselves as magazines: Designboom (1998), Architonic (2003), and Dezeen (2006). Currently, perhaps as a result of their evolution into multi-format media —written, digital, and printed media— or the adaptation of their business models, they have redefined their own definitions. The Mexican editorial Arquine defines itself as "a project dedicated to the dissemination of architectural culture," while ArchDaily calls itself "a source of tools, inspiration, and knowledge," without specifying which format is.
Digital architecture media adapted the organizational structure of printed magazines and journalism to create their own curatorial and editorial management, redefining the meaning of each position over nearly two decades. New roles emerged, such as editors, curators, chief editors, and managing editors. Digital media incorporated traditional journalism formats, such as opinion columns, essays, and interviews, but one of their milestones was the creation of a constant flow of news related to architecture, urbanism, and cities.
An architectural news is any event that deserves to be reported to both the disciplinary public and those interested in architecture. Among the most common topics are announcements of future works and results of awards and design competitions. Later on, the massification and professionalization of image rendering accompanied (or monopolized) this new format alongside the proliferation of image-centered social networks like Instagram, reinforcing a contemporary idea of architecture reduced to images.
While architectural news is not an invention of digital media, its presence in specialized magazines was minimal in the 20th century, with some exceptions like The Architect's Newspaper, and even rarer in traditional press outside the United States and Europe. In the case of magazines, their periodicity (monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, semiannually) made any attempt to cover news obsolete as they quickly became outdated. Furthermore, news, as informative text, usually had little value as a source of analysis in the discipline.
In the logic of constantly expanding audiences, news served digital architecture media as a format for rapid production and high media reach (equivalent to reach and engagement on Instagram and Facebook) since neither specialized magazines produced them nor traditional media were interested in them (until now). And if they were, they were written by journalists, not architects.
The production of architectural news faced a challenge in its scalability process: project narratives are usually written by their own authors. The texts do not aim to inform general audiences but to inspire or persuade fellow architects. Thus, the production of architectural news adopted an informative language that borrowed elements from journalism, such as the 5W guide; the elimination of anthropomorphism as a literary figure ("The project aims to be..."); and the recurrent use of excerpts from official project narratives as citations from primary sources.
In this process, both important architectural offices interested in their media positioning and those interested in their media positioning, along with real estate developers, public agencies related to construction, and other stakeholders, incorporated PR departments to centralize and optimize media coverage of their projects. Thus, the press release became the official narrative of architectural offices: it is more convenient for editors but insurmountable for critics. In the hands of PR professionals, architecture is conveyed like any other marketable product.
The consolidation of digital architecture media forced digital editors and curators to recognize a constellation of already established offices that, regardless of the quality of each of their works, can attract the attention of both the general public and specialists who want to stay informed about their most recent projects and future developments.
Therefore, architectural work is also news in itself.
Conclusions
Web 2.0 in architecture allowed a transformation in the production, documentation, and discussion of the discipline: it decimated physical magazines, created new power players, decentralized the discussion, and brought in issues that were originally considered unrelated to the discipline, such as labor conditions, feminism, the climate crisis, and underrepresentation.
Additionally, the model of social networks relies on the consumption, production, and remixing of audiovisual content, in which architecture plays a key role, as it is not only a producer of space but also of images: both real works and future works, imaginary proposals designed only for architecture competitions, on websites that have developed a business model that focuses on the continuous creation of these competitions and are supported by the registration fees of those who apply.
Self-publishing allowed in digital media made many fear that the absence of academic criteria would blur the boundaries of good architecture. However, to this day, major architecture awards still adhere to rules that have changed little, if at all, in recent times. This reveals that either the establishment never changed, or despite the multiple changes in the discipline, little changed.
When we do not recognize ourselves in the changes of our society, discipline, and environment, we believe that these changes are deteriorating rather than stopping to reflect on what the new rules of the game are. This phenomenon occurs constantly throughout history, and for some reason, it still seems like an unprecedented event that only happens to us and our generation.
Special thanks to Christele Harrouk.
This essay is an adaptation of “Apuntes para una historia de los medios digitales en la Web 2.0 y su impacto en la arquitectura” (Notes for a History of Digital Media in Web 2.0 and Its Impact on Architecture"), published in the ninth issue of the academic journal SOBRE from the Technical School of Architecture of Granada, Spain.
