There's Something Going On Here But You Don't Know What It Is, Do You Mister Jones?

In November 1938, Editors of The Architectural Forum penned this birth announcement for the latest offspring from the Time & Life Building at Rockefeller Center: "In all the controversy that has revolved around the subject of modern architecture, one small fact has often gone unobserved: Modern, as with all architecture today, has its extremists, its moderates, and its conservatives. Far from being a reflection on the movement, however, this lack of unanimity bears testimony to its strength and long standing.

"The chief indication of Modern's vigor vigor is its dynamic, highly controversial quality, and it is not necessary to look far back to see that the revolutionary developments of yesterday are the commonplace of today. And so, presumably for tomorrow.

"Because extremist minority opinion can so quickly become majority fact, because out of the "wildest" theories often come the most vital ideas, and because THE FORUM in name intends to remain a forum in fact, PLUS now appears to add opinion, exploration and new controversy to reporting.

To PLUS and its editors, THE ARCHITECTURAL FORUM offers its best wishes -- and a free hand."


Herbert Matter: PLUS 1. New York: Architectural Forum/ Time Inc., December 1938. Photographically printed self-wrappers.

PLUS (subtitled ORIENTATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE) premiered in December 1938 as a 16-page, two-color saddle-stitched magazine designed by Herbert Matter and assembled by no less than five editors: Wallace K. Harrison, William Lescaze, William Muschenheim, Stamo Papadaki, and James Johnson Sweeney.

Seventy years of hindsight clearly shows that the Forum Editors (including George Nelson and Henry Wright at the time) made a brilliant choice by giving Herbert Matter free reign of the mise-en-page. His mastery of the European Avant-garde visual vocabulary -- including PhotoMontage and Avant-Garde typography -- matched the eclectic editorial content of this short-lived architectural publishing experiment.

The Gang of Five fulfilled their promise to explore all aspects of the plastic arts via established and emerging experts. "Toward a Unity of the Constructive Arts" by Naum Gabo; "Can Expositions Survive?" by Dr. Siegfried Giedion; "The Question of “Truth” by Fernand Leger; "Regionalism in Architecture" by Richard J. Neutra; and "Alexander Calder: Movement as Plastic Element" by James Johnson Sweeney all appeared in the first two issues of PLUS.



Who knows what might have eventually appeared in the slender offshoot of The Forum? The list of collaborators credited in the first issue is truly mind-boggling, including Max Abramovitz, Josef Albers, Walter Curt Behrendt, Marcel Breuer, John Albert Frey, R. Buckminster Fuller, Philip L. Goodwin, Bertrand Goldberg, Harwell Hamilton Harris, George Fred Keck, Albert Kahn, L. Moholy-Nagy, Richard J. Neutra, Peter Pfisterer, Antonin Raymond, R. M. Schindler, Paul Schweikher, Edward Durell Stone, Le Corbusier, Alberto Sartoris, and P. Morton Shand. The Cambridge Post Office must have lost the Walter Gropius invitation.



Herbert Matter: PLUS 2. New York: Architectural Forum/ Time Inc., February 1939. Photographically printed self-wrappers with printed vellum wrapper.

We'll never know what PLUS might have grown into. The cultural soil of North America before World War II wasn't fertile enough to sustain or nurture such a broadminded publishing experiment. Letters to the Forum made it perfectly clear that the nose-to-the-grindstone working professionals were too busy recovering from the Depression and had no time for such nonsense.

Imagine Thurston Howell III reading this:

"I am as much irritated as entertained by M. Fernand Leger's pontifications on truth -- as is usually the case with the "enfant terrible," his truths are but half or quarter truths, having a momentary distorted validity bearing no relativity to that summation or distillation of fact which lurks the real truth . . . ." -- Charles Voorhies, San Francisco

Or this:

"Information given in an architectural magazine should be written be clear-headed people who have something of interest to say to architects and the editors should go back to sensible typography." -- Charles Killiam, Cambridge

Or:

"Your Surrealist section PLUS is probably intended to be an expression of the subconscious minds of its editors. . . . some of us would prefer to read the magazine without that "morning after" sensation that PLUS gives us." -- Arthur Loveless, Seattle

These sentiments were apparently enough to ensure that PLUS lived a short life. A very short life. I don't even know how many issues were published -- I've only seen the first three and have no documentation pointing to further issues. Mainstream America (v. 1939) was painfully unreceptive to the rapidly-emigrating sensibilities of the European Avant-Garde, thus assuring that PLUS quickly ended up like tears in the rain.

Now these slim quartos remain as shining examples of undiluted American optimism for a better future through good design.