here & now

Personally, I’ve never understood why architecture, obviously an art that has an immediate impact on our daily lives and thus a truly popular genre, has always been hiding behind a nebular cloud of abstract and highly intellectual, and all too often pretentious, vocabulary. And so it’s been wonderfully invigorating to see an architecture publication indulge with such obvious glee in stripping architecture writing off its über-theoretical ballast and making it kind of fun again, by not taking it all that seriously. In a wildly eclectic slalom of interviews, essays and photo portfolios, the aptly named Pin-Up from New York are not afraid to mix challenging with camp, radical with silly, minimal with pompous, stylish with hopelessly outdated. Oh, they’ll even have a pin-up grace an architectural shoot if must be. The design is fantastically irreverent, set entirely in Arial – here’s that smirk again. ‘Architectural Entertainment’ it is and who would have thought that architecture could be this sexy?