Arts & Architecture Magazine
Online Magazine/Archive
  Brand Identity & Web Design Arts & Architecture (1938-1967) was the first American magazine to bring to light the work of the emerging West Coast architects Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler, Charles Eames, Lloyd Wright, John Lautner, Ed Killingsworth, and the artisans in steel Raphael Soriano, Pierre Koenig and Craig Ellwood, among others, who all flourished under its illumination.
 
Arts & Architecture Magazine: Web Site


Arts & Architecture Magazine: Web Site

The magazine also embodied the highest standards of quality and innovation in the then-emerging profession of graphic design by employing the talents of such designers as Herbert Matter, Alvin Lustig, and John Follis. Featuring work by writers such as architectural historian Esther McCoy, A&A covered art, music, literature, and modernist architecture while focussing on low-cost housing with its sponsorship of the Case Study House Program, which reinvented the post-war single family house.

Published and edited by John Entenza until 1962, the magazine was taken over by David Travers, who in 2006 commissioned Design Latitudes to revitalize A&A as a striking new website, artsandarchitecture.com.

Our solution was to create a minimalist online environment as a foil to the magazine's innovative and experimental work which helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design. We created a fresh new abbreviated brand identity based on the original letterforms of the logotype created by Alvin Lustig.

Arts & Architecture Magazine: New Logotype

The new site offers selected material from the magazine, including all of the Case Study Houses from January 1945 through August 1967, when the magazine ceased publication during the Summer of Love. The content is targeted to instill a sense of artistic and architectural history to a burgeoning new generation of the architects of culture.

The web-savvy octogenarian David Travers said, "Architecture, which used to be serious but fun, is now serious but silly. The avant-garde in architecture has lost its way. There's an absence of social significance, of moral and ethical meaning and not just in housing. But architecture is resilient, always on the edge, always in transition and perhaps, just maybe, reviving A&A in this way will have a benign influence, nudging the young away from the architectural narcissism evident today and back to the proportion and civilized sensibilities of the A&A period."

The internet publication of A&A was made possible by Benedikt Taschen and his eponymous publishing house, which is reissuing the magazine in book form in the Spring of 2008.

"Working with DL has been a pleasant and rewarding experience. I was shepherded beautifully and unerringly through a new and to me complex process. Much of this has been due to David Curry listening carefully and understanding what this client had in mind and correcting me with extreme diplomacy when I was heading beyond the bounds of the possible," said Travers.


visit: artsandarchitecture.com

Arts & Architecture Magazine: Cover Art