MacGuffin #14, The Wall
210 x 275mm, 218 pages
Amsterdam, Netherlands (English language)
Biannual
Editors: Kirsten Algera & Ernst van der Hoeven
Design: Sandra Kassenaar
‘The Life of Things’
The gift that keeps on giving... unabashedly firm magCulture favourite (plus one of our top sellers) MacGuffin delivers another standout issue, its 14th, a bit by bit unpacking of ‘The Wall’ in its many forms—that's green walls, paywalls, uterine walls, curtainwalls, apartheid walls and fourth walls. As the team note, it's an object/infrastructure with typically negative connotations, so it's particularly interesting to explore the wall's contradictory nature across geopolitics, architecture and society at large.
A brick-hued cover makes this issue temptingly stackable, covering the consumerist infatuation with brutalism, death by wallpaper, a tour of Paris in seven walls, the renaissance of the underground bunker, French free-climber Alain Roberts, and Trump's border walls as land art. With contributions from Liv Siddal, Seb Emina, Rem Koolhaas and more. (And yes, there is a Pink Floyd reference in there too.)
On the Journal
Our Magazine of the Month review: ‘MacGuffin remains an essential magazine, an ideal riposte to anyone doubting the power of print. As well as being editorially brilliant, it is also, itself, a beautiful Thing. Its size, format and combination of papers making it a lovely object to hold and to flick through’.