Conversation with Tom Weaver, Editor.

Tom kindly agreed to complete some lists for me:

List One:

Most Admired Architectural Historians (in no order)

Banham, Summerson, Evans, Vidler, Rowe, even Sorkin (cheekiest critic).

List Two:

Top Journals

1. AA Files, and then in brackets, ‘by a million miles’.

2. Arch+, nice mix of the contemporary and historical and never following the herd.

3. Criticat, low-tech, polemical French journal, produced by the great Françoise Fromonot. The buildings are shot guerrilla-style, photographers jumping over fences, blurry shots … they show architecture the way you actually see a building.

List Three:

The criteria for work accepted in AA Files:

1. Absolutely no projects. The writing is always a comment on something else – the ‘exact opposite of a project’.

2. Lots of good stories.

3. Avoid usual suspects.

4. Essays not papers, and try and get rid of footnotes (except for Georges Teyssot’s texts – where the best stuff is the footnotes).

5. Encourage younger writers, who write specifically for the journal, rather than older, established writers who send in lectures they have presented a million times before.

List Four:

Top Teachers (in no particular order):

Adrian Forty

Georges Teyssot

Peter Eisenman

List Five:

Favourite Architectural Encounters:

1. A conversation with Swiss art and architectural historians Karin Gimmi and Martino Stierli, discussing Max Bill and Max Frisch while swimming across Lake Zurich.

2. Leon Krier in Poundbury for AA Files – architecture’s pantomime villain; scary but engaging.

3. Berthold Lubetkin – at the Bartlett School in June 1990, just a few months before he died.

And a statement:

There is no architecture in the US only buildings – ‘Jesus, I’m sounding like Pevsner here’ – this is why US architecture schools are built around architectural theory, because that is all that architecture is in the US. In Europe and the UK it is the opposite. Everything is architecture; this is why all schools here are dominated by practice, and architectural history becomes this little bit of inconsequential salad dressing on the side.