I started working at Metropolis in March 1981, three months before
the inaugural issue. The magazine's office was in a dusty loft building
on Sixth Avenue. There was a small courtyard behind the building containing
a 150-year-old community graveyard. If the elevator wasn't working, which
was often, one would climb the wide interior staircase and see this incongruous
cityscape, its toppled marble stones etched with their assortment of brief
hopes for everlasting life. This eerie scene was closer to old New England
than downtown Manhattan--and seemed an inauspicious place to launch a magazine.
A few months later we moved to a rooftop office on West 25th Street.
That aerie outpost was actually a good place for a magazine--a brave little
cabin perched on top of a 14-story printing building. The idea, of course,
was that such a perspective represented an overview of the metropolis the
magazine was trying to express. But the fact that it was metaphorically
correct didn't make it safe, which I discovered one morning when I arrived
at the office early to find shattered glass, a bloodstained window
guard, and papers and office equipment strewn across the fioor.
As so often happens in a crisis, my mind went into split screen. I went
through all the reasonable motions of calling the police and cleaning up.
But the other side of my brain was engaged in something different. I found
myself staring at the smear of blood on then editor Sharon Lee Ryder's typewriter.
As a design editor, I couldn't help but notice that it was positioned perfectly
on the bridge above the keyboard. Certainly it had a nice graphic element:
it was dynamic, conveyed a certain improvisational fiair, and animated
an otherwise rather staid piece of office machinery. You could even
say there was an elegant brutalism to it. The blood on the Selectric, my
addled mind reasoned, was the ideal logo for the new magazine.
In retrospect, it was a forgivable reaction. Certainly one's thoughts swirl
about in strange ways in the middle of a crisis. But split-screen thinking
was actually good for a design writer in the early 1980s. At one extreme,
you had Massimo Vignelli proclaiming, "Everything has its own order.
You can't take a piece of music and scramble the notes. You can't take a
space and scramble the chairs around." Yet things did seem very scrambled:
you had Egyptian temples, rock 'n' roll, and Italian accessories colliding
in the work of design collective Memphis--and its leader Ettore Sottsass
in Memphis, Tennessee, eating barbecue with a plastic fork and being told
by a blues singer, "You gotta cool out your insides."
No one was cooling out anything then. The material landscape of the Reagan
era was distinguished by excess--those $2,000 taffeta pouf skirts and their
architectural equivalent, the lavish high-stakes real-estate speculation
of Donald Trump. As the homeless population surged and AIDS struck, glossy
shelter magazines documented every thread of silk wallpaper and leaf of
topiary in the Hamptons. On the critical front, there was the journalism
emerging from the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies--cerebral,
analytical, scholarly, and theoretical. Metropolis was after something
else: an informed dialogue for both professionals and nonprofessionals about
how the shape of the physical world refiects and infiuences everything
around it. A lot of magazines are after that today. But 20 years ago it
seemed almost revolutionary. Besides, all the contradictions made for good
copy. Remember John Burgee's observation that "architecture makes a
better mousetrap"?
