New York Review of Architecture #45
270 x 405 mm, 52 pages (staple bound)
New York, US
Bimonthly
First published in 2019
Editor: Samuel Medina
Art director: Laura Coombs
Cover: Sean Suchara
Tall and slim (much like a skyscraper...), NYRA naturally ‘reviews architecture in New York,’ featuring columns, essays, criticism and more, beginning with a particularly amusing Letters to the Editors section.
Smartly redesigned in 2022—its newsprint pages and slab serif typography Interview-esque—you’ll find plenty of visual character to go alongside the sharp writing (not least its rodent mascots).
Those rodents are the focus of a couple of brilliant pieces in this March/April 2025 edition: a passionate monologue from a rat's POV (‘I'm a regular guy, a New Yorker born and bred’ declares Mason Imrat) offers a prelude to Aaron Timms' essay on the city's futile mayoral war on rodents, questioning whether it's a human or rat world we're actually living in. Elsewhere, Samuel Medina critiques last year's architecture flicks (or flops?) Megalopolis and The Brutalist, while New York's landmarks—past, present and imagined—coalesce into a fantastical cityscape on the cover (see the key inside).
On the Journal
At Work With Samuel Medina: ‘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.’
read more