Designing communication | Communicating design: multimodality, interdisciplinary methods, and the challenge of architectural magazine exceptionalism

This paper surveys the terrain of recent architectural magazine scholarship and proposes that this rapidly developing intellectual field is still developing methodologies to deal with its object of analysis—the magazines of architecture.

Through a critical review of contemporary magazine studies, the primary theoretical and methodological trajectories being used in disciplines other than architecture are identified and their potential benefits for architectural magazine scholarship acknowledged. It is argued that for architectural magazine scholarship to develop its own methods, it will first be necessary to take notice of what is occurring in media studies, journalism, design history, and linguistics. It is the purpose of this paper to make these ‘other approaches’ visible and available to architectural magazine scholars and in doing so, challenge the exceptionality of architectural magazines.