Separate but intertwined, the history of graphic design has a unique relationship to architectural history. One could describe it as a kind of coevolution, symbiotic perhaps, even if graphic design remains in architecture’s deep shadow. Only rarely are the intricacies of this relationship teased out into the light.

In a recent March 2010 talk at SCI-ARC called “Publishing Practices” Michael Kubo presented a fascinating take on book publishing in architecture as a kind of ‘operative device’ which I take to mean as a kind of parallel or alternative practice in architecture. The explicit premise of Kubo’s presentation was that there was a kind of canon to architectural publishing that could be delineated and dissected over time. These works were ordered in a kind of typology of architectural books: monographs, manifestos, and  histories. On a timeline Kubo mapped this collection of books in two ways; in the X-axis as a linear timeline of books and in the Y-axis as a kind of evolutionary tree showing both antecedents and descendents of a given work. His list includes ten books by Le Corbusier, Giedion, the Smithsons, Banham, Eisenman, Koolhaas, and Venturi/Scott Brown, a kind of carefully selected summa of architectural book production in the 20th century. At the crux of his presentation Kubo provided a case study of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas fleshing out the history of the studio and book. What is fascinating here is the collision of graphic design history and architectural history that ended in one of the more prominent erasures in design history. Kubo very carefully outlined the tensions and conflicts between book designer Muriel Cooper and Venturi/Scott Brown in the production of the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas. Most amusing were the annotations and marginalia on proofs that Kubo showed with Cooper repeatedly replying with a tersely written ‘NO’ to suggestions for changes. Less amusing was the agreement with MIT press that let Cooper’s first edition be published only to be obliterated by the second ‘revised’ edition. The admiration with which most designers view Cooper’s design of the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas is probably best summed up in this 2004 Design Observer post by William Drenttel: “Learning from Las Vegas: The Book That (Still) Takes My Breath Away”. Comments in the discussion thread from Michael Beirut and Lorraine Wild only add emphasis to this point.

Nicely dovetailing with the Kubo lecture is the exhibit ‘Las Vegas Studio: Images From the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’ at MOCA/Pacific Design Center (on view until June 20th.) In vitrines one can view the weird progress of the design from oversized mockups done by the Learning from Las Vegas studio to the first edition then on to the second edition and a myriad of translated editions. The early mockups and first edition are clearly unified by a sui generis modernist design sensibility: a cinematic editing of the photos and illustrations, a fusion of text and image on a large scale page size and a typographic structure that emphasized a simultaneity of multiple texts. In comparison the now ubiquitous second edition effectively gutted Cooper’s “offensive and anathematical” original design by shoveling the content into a much smaller trade paperback size. Images are presented separate from text, and texts that initially ran in parallel are now divided up into endnotes. Far from mirroring an ‘ugly and ordinary’ aesethetic this ‘undesigning’ makes the book seem less readable. The visual research the Learning from Las Vegas studio did is integral to the rhetoric of the argument, to arbitrarily segregate the images and text is a rather mind boggling decision. The power and acuity of the writing manages to hold everything together despite the requirement of flipping back and forth between reference images and the essays (in frustration one is almost inspired to photocopy the images out of the book and bind an ad hoc ‘zine’ supplement to read alongside).

The fact that the Learning from Las Vegas book is canonical in architectural history yet is a kind of void in graphic design history is a reminder of an insistent unease in the relationship between these two histories. Perhaps this unease is born of a kind of realization that this relationship often becomes a more or less traditional one; with architecture providing the content and “authorship” and graphic design merely providing an efficient service to the client. But implicit in Kubo’s presentation is the idea that architecture and graphic design are becoming more closely aligned. Architecture has become as much about representation, discursive schemes and ‘paper’ speculations as it is about an actually existing built environment. Despite the proliferation of digital tools that enable a kind of plasticity to visualization and production in both design and architecture, books still have an extraordinary primacy and cultural value. In the end the thinly veiled issue at stake here is the one of authorship. As William Drenttel notes, Cooper’s first edition of Learning from Las Vegas is a definitive early example of the graphic designer as auteur. In a sense she was perhaps too successful as an auteur since both Venturi and Scott Brown felt displaced as the putative ‘authors’ of the book.

But what if this saga was flipped on its head? Or more to the point what if the designer and architect had found a way to reach a sort of authorial detente? Kubo’s own timeline points the way. A quarter of a century after Learning from Las Vegas, S,M,L,XL is the only book on the timeline with both architect (Rem Koolhaas) and designer (Bruce Mau) credited as authors. As an anatomy and compendium of OMA’s practice (a snapshot now 15 years old) S,M, L,XL has the literal heft of a landmark in architectural publishing. But viewed in light of Bruce Mau’s design practice it entails another history as a kind of prelude to Mau’s own exhaustive doorstop Lifestyle published in 2000. If S,M,L,XL is the last stop on Kubo’s timeline, the final book influential enough to achieve canonicity in architectural publishing, then Mau’s Lifestyle positions itself as a contender for a similar position in graphic design publishing. Lifestyle fits into that ever more commonplace niche in design publishing known as the self-initiated monograph in which any third-party perspective is removed in favor of auto-critique or more preferably self-hagiography. To be fair Lifestyle is engaging as a mid-career retrospective of Mau’s studio, showing aspects of process and research that too often goes missing and buried in most design history. Recently Jonathan Barnbrook and 2 x 4 have entered the big book fray with The Barnbrook Bible and It Is What It Is. It remains to be seen if these monographs will form some sort of meaningful, influential ‘canon’ or are merely symptoms of designers’ desire to create enormous paperbound versions of themselves. In a sense these books are a bid for history, but will the history stick?

More interesting is the notion that if publishing is a form of architectural practice, then graphic designers have a certain authorial stake in the process. As Kubo emphasized in his presentation the books in his timeline are valuable not only for their content but equally for their “totality as a graphic object – a careful and deliberate construction of format, layout, images, and words”. If architects sometimes see graphic design as a minor, subsidiary design practice, this view is bit harder to maintain when the book itself becomes the locus of a kind of architectural practice. Architectural design is not isomorphic to graphic design. There maybe some similar foundations and analogies in design processes,  but a translator is still needed, a designer skilled in shaping a multifarious object which is part typographic system, sequential medium, interface and material embodiment a.k.a. the book. Despite recurrent and specious attempts to write the book’s obituary as a ‘dead’ medium, architectural publishing would seem to be a vital niche where books will have a unique durability, still retaining a value that verges on the totemic.

Kubo’s notion of ‘publishing practices’ in architecture is an idea that is wide open enough to encompass numerous histories, it is an operative device that can jump boundaries and generate meaningful, creative friction between design disciplines.