Design Quarterly no. 63, Minneapolis

Founded in 1946, Design Quarterly was published by the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. By the mid-sixties Design Quarterly began to shift from its initial focus on arts, crafts and “well-designed” objects to feature experimental architecture, urbanism, new technologies, and the environment. From 1964 to 1968 Peter Seitz served as editor of the journal and was largely responsible for introducing issues that investigated the relationship between technology, art, and design. The year 1965 marked a curious shift in the history of Design Quarterly with its release of “A Clip-On Architecture,” an issue featuring an image of Archigram’s Walking City in New York (Ron Herron, 1964) on its cover. Edited by Peter Seitz and authored by Reyner Banham, the issue introduced the American public to avant-garde architectural practices in Europe. In addition to the striking images of the “non-repeating” components of Alison and Peter Smithson’s “House of the Future,” Ionel Schein and René Coulon’s prefabricated motel units, Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, and Archigram’s Plug-In Cities, Banham’s text offered a theoretical context for conceptualizing an architecture of indeterminate form assembled from expendable components. AF

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