ABSTRACT

In Chapter 3, on the artist/architect collaboration between Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley, I sought to demonstrate how the event of their work being incorporated into The Architects’ Journal (The AJ) as a building study and practice profile led to contradiction in the editorial discourse of the journal, manifest in the way the editors discursively ‘frame’ Warren & Mosley’s work through the use of titles and captions. I claim that whilst we can assume from the article intellectual acknowledgement of Warren & Mosley’s practice at a personal level of editorial practice through commissioning, within the ‘editorial frame’ a counter impulse of repression occurs, representing a negation of the work at an institutional level of editorial practice. In this chapter, I wish to explore further the source of that ‘acknowledgement’, to look at other examples of commissioning and journalistic/essayistic practice in the work of the then ‘reviews editor’ of the journal, Andrew Mead. 1 My analysis will cover a selection of significant article contributions written by Mead himself and will seek to define a wider, underlying project in Mead’s work. This could be qualified as a covert critical project that carefully traces the line between the institutional responsibilities of editorial practice and a more personal, exploratory investigation into different modes of perception, documentation and critique in relation to spatial design. The task here is, therefore, to bring to light the effects of a certain degree of encryption with Mead’s articles, which may operate at both conscious and unconscious levels, and to search within the terms of that encryption for evidence of utopian impulse.