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Samuel Medina, New York Review of Architecture
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Samuel Medina, New York Review of Architecture

Samuel Medina is a New York-based writer and editor of New York Review of Architecture, having been previously the executive editor of the Architect’s Newspaper and deputy editor of Metropolis magazine.

His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Artforum, The Art Newspaper, and Harvard Design Magazine. In addition to planning the six print issues of NYRA for the coming year, he will soon begin drafting plans for the second edition of its sister publication, Los Angeles Review of Architecture, due out this summer. 

We’ve stocked NYRA at magCulture for the past year and seen it develop a keen local audience for its coverage of more than just architecture. Samuel describes it as ‘an independent, subscriber-supported publication that believes both in criticism and in architecture’s relevance to the wider culture.’ Read on to hear more about the magazine’s rat mascots too.

 


What are you doing this Monday morning? 
I get up early to read for a couple of hours before I check my work email. I have, and hate that I have, a finicky process for brewing coffee. I don’t eat breakfast but drink a lot of water. On a side table, books and magazines are precariously stacked beside my coffee; somewhere in there is the latest issue of the journal Cured Quail, which contains a jeremiad against concrete by the theorist Anselm Jappe that I’ve been meaning to read.

 

 

I relocate to my work desk and begin proofing our weekly events newsletter, then check Slack for any updates from my colleagues. After making a couple assignments for our July/August issue, I recommence editing a 6,000-word essay about prefabricated architecture for our March/April edition. I’m a longtime partisan of Microsoft Word, but a recent enshittifying update has resulted in some frustrating functionality issues. (Note: Select the ‘List’ option under the ‘Show Comments’ dropdown in the Review panel, unless you want any marginal comments to disappear from view.) 

 

Describe your work environment—what can you see from your desk? 
My desk is nestled in a corner of the living room, hemmed in on one side by a Billy bookcase and potted plants and windows on the other. I look out onto the forecourt of our building and watch people issue from underneath the portico, a hint of resignation in their gait as they begin their commute.

I live in northcentral Queens, on a residential street lined with large prewar apartment buildings with ostentatious names. The nearest commercial strip is an avenue away, so the only noise comes from drivers stopped at the traffic light or teens on their way to or from school. I sip what’s left of my now-cold coffee and optimistically attempt the pomodoro technique. I keep my phone in my bedroom closet, though I get iMessage alerts on my 2013 iMac. A postcard of Lenin a friend brought back from Moscow several years ago is propped up against the base of the monitor. It’s a cold morning, and a bit gloomy, which I consider ideal. The sun comes out soon.

 

Which magazine do you first remember?

The first magazine I subscribed to—at the age of nine or so—was MotorTrend. I committed all the latest makes, performance metrics, and MSRPs to memory. My interest in car spoilers soon waned, however, and I started asking my mom to buy me issues of Cook’s Illustrated, mostly because I liked to redraw the sketchy renditions of gourds, burdock roots, and alliums.

 


The first design magazine I remember leafing through was Metropolis, which I encountered in the Washington, DC, office of a pulmonary specialist as a young teen. It was a tabloid and had an Absolut Vodka ad on the back cover. I ended up working at the same magazine years later, long after Absolut stopped advertising in trade magazines. 

Aside from yours, what’s your favourite magazine? 
The London Review of Books and n+1—not an entirely original answer, I’m afraid. But they don’t put many constraints on their writers, which is commendable. New Left Review still offers some of the best political analysis available, and its Sidecar blog is doing fantastic things with cultural critique, too.

 


Describe NYRA in three words

‘Original, unsparing, overwritten.’ The words are those of a new reader who wrote in with a minor correction couched in winking, high-flown praise. But I think they apply.

 

There is some confusion here at magCulture; are your rodent mascots mice or rats? 
Rats! We adopted the mascot after I assigned and published a short piece from the critic Kate Wagner about her appreciation for Scabby the Rat. Sean Suchara, who illustrates all our covers and spots, designed the NYRAT as we—publisher Nicolas Kemper, former deputy editor Marianela D’Aprile, art director Laura Coombs, associate publisher Nicholas Raap, and I—were retooling the print magazine in summer 2022. (NYRA was originally founded in May 2019 and existed in different guises before the current bimonthly newsprint tabloid.)

With the redesign, we knew we wanted to appeal to a broader readership—a somewhat daunting task when you have a chewy word like “architecture” in your masthead. The mascot helps draw people in, compels them to flip through the magazine. Guest illustrators are invited to put their own spin on the ratty motif. At some point in the future, I’d like to see the NYRAT make friends with pigeons, raccoons, and other grubby New York fauna.


NYRA concerns architecture, of course, but its remit reaches further than only that. How would you describe its scope?
It’s important to us that NYRA feels rooted in New York City, by which I don’t just mean Manhattan or North Brooklyn but also Queens, the Bronx, the rest of Kings County, even Staten Island (within limits). We tend to prioritize working writers over academics or practicing designers, but we’re interested in working with anyone who can write creatively and critically about the city.

Our writers take New York as their starting point and spiral out from there, covering subjects ranging from labor organizing at design firms to NYU’s edifice complex to hot-sheet hotels to public toilets to the Wegmans supermarket on Astor Place. 

 

The cover of issue 40 reproduces the vibe of the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Courtesy Nicolas Kemper


The magazine has established a very clear visual identity that allows longform texts in an informal zine-like context, and is very different to other architecture mags. Can you tell us a little about how that came about?

My background is in design publishing. Thirty or forty years ago, architecture magazines flew editors and writers to buildings in far-flung places and paid photographers to shoot them. Writer fees were much higher, and the writers themselves could get away with a lot more. All of this was built on an advertising model that flatlined in the late aughts.

Now, most of these publications are reliant on design firms and their public-relations consultants to provide them with visual and descriptive assets. You receive everything in a single Dropbox folder.

NYRA is an independent, subscriber-supported publication that believes both in criticism and in architecture’s relevance to the wider culture. And because we’re on newsprint and are limited in the colors we use, we opt for original, irreverent illustrations instead of flashy photography. The better to foreground the writing that we invest so much in.

NYRA managing editor Chloe Wyma and I attend to every word of a draft, regardless of its length. (Our essays range from 4,000 to 10,000 words, though we also love the capsule format.) Nicolas, Marianela, and I consulted with the Freelance Solidarity Project of the National Writers Union to create a standard contract and a statement of commitments that promotes fair practices for freelancers.

Mascots and longform essays sans photos may seem like a counterintuitive approach for an architecture magazine‚ and it is. But it’s worked for us.

 


Please show us one spread that sums up how the magazine works, and gives a sense of what the reader can expect from it.

‘Wrecking Ball’, in which a writer is invited to rhetorically demolish a New York City building, institution, or policy shibboleth, is our most popular column (or ‘vertical,’ if you prefer). In this spread, Samuel Stein’s righteously contrarian case against a beloved New York museum is foregrounded by an arguably iffy headline. Different treatments have been applied to several areas of text—most notably, the gleeful use of NYRA’s signature reverse italics, which readers either love or hate. Then there’s illustrator Anna Haifisch’s emaciated, strung-out take on our customary personified rat and also the weeping wrecking ball. 


What advice would you offer someone planning to launch a magazine?
Don’t confuse relevance with the online news cycle. If you’re starting a magazine, chances are your resources will be limited, and so you can’t afford to be pulled into a race with other media outfits many times your size. Not that it can’t be done—Hell Gate, a digital-only publication that covers New York City politics and culture in the mold of Gothamist and Gawker, does an admirable job breaking stories and covering multiple beats. NYRA’s editorial goals are different, and we organize our work around those discrete priorities.

It’s also true that publishing is about more than texts and illustrations on the page. Our print issues also sustain a social network of readers, writers, designers, planners, etc.—namely through launch parties that are routinely attended by several hundred people. And like Hell Gate, NYRA is a worker cooperative, which affords us the ability to transparently set the stakes of our project.  

What are you most looking forward to this coming week?
At the risk of sounding like a total homebody, I’m hoping to make use of a perforated tart pan I purchased a month ago for a quiche Lorraine. I cook a lot and like to think there are commonalities shared by food and architecture writing. But rather than enumerate any points of overlap, I’ll direct the reader to the sumptuously styled work of Jonathan Meades and of NYRA contributor Aaron Timms, which effortlessly tack back and forth between the arts of cuisine and construction. 

Editor Samuel Medina

Art director Laura Coombs

Cover illustrations Sean Suchara

nyra.nyc

 

 

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