Blueprint is going out of print, but its glory days are not over yet

In its magazine format it lasted 37 years, criticising architecture and design with true energy. Now it is online onlyBlueprint, aged 37, the architecture and design magazine on which I cut my journalistic teeth, has announced that it will now be online only. This has prompted a certain amount of reminiscing about the glory days of print that is slightly at odds with my memories of its permanently precarious existence in a tumbledown Marylebone building shared with both future movers and shakers in the cultural world and a number of rats, and subject to occasional visits from angry creditors. In the leanest times, we put out 48-page editions: 24 of editorial, 24 of advertising. The magazine's most recent and final issue ran to 240. The difference perhaps was the impact that could be made by those hard-won pages in the much smaller media space available. This was something that Blueprint's founders triumphantly did, bringing a graphic and verbal energy to the discussion of architecture and design, and a freedom from stuffiness, from which everyone now in the field continues to benefit. Continue reading...