ABSTRACT
The first issue of NATØ magazine, subtitled ‘ALBION, STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART’ was published in 1983 by the Architectural Association, edited by Coates, and contained the Unit 10 end of year project – Albion – that had caused such outrage among the external examiners. The magazine was initiated in parallel to the group’s formation – individual members were called upon by Coates with a personal invitation attached to a globe key ring to attend the first official NATØ meeting in the summer of 1983. Alvin
FIGURE 3.1 Invitation to the first NATØ meeting from Nigel Coates to Mark Prizeman, 1983
Boyarsky had offered Coates the opportunity to produce a book with the students – a volume which would expand upon the ideas developed by the unit and feature the Albion project. The book as a medium was quickly rejected by the group, who felt strongly that a magazine more properly reflected the spirit of their work – which was not interested in the sort of publication that the architectural mainstream was producing and that might be relegated to the dusty shelves of a library. For the same reasons as artists who used the ‘little magazine’ to ‘enter into a heightened relationship with the present moment’ and to create an ‘alternative space for art’, or the punks who self-published zines in order to escape the confines of mainstream culture and articulate a voice of resistance, so NATØ harnessed the magazine format.1 In this respect, the magazine as a medium carries with it the myth of the avant-garde, and for NATØ the appeal of such connotations cannot be overlooked.
