Position(s)

Zak Kyes and Bedford Press joins ASAP with the donation of publications to the collection. Bedford Press, an imprint of AA Publications based at the Architectural Association, London, was initiated by AA Art Director Zak Kyes and Wayne Daly in 2008. The press focuses on creating a new typology of publications that explore architecture as seen through the lens of its allied disciplines. Titles encompassing art, exhibition making, graphic design and theory build upon the AA’s renowned legacy of short-run independent publications.

How can publishing provide a critical forum for the generation, rather than documentation of, architecture? How can publishing eschew modernist categories of editor, designer, author, distributor to respond to social media? How can the book and text as spatial constructs stand in analogous relation to architecture, rather than as a secondary and parasitic description of architecture? How can circulation constitute, and be constituted by, the spatio-temporal environment? Speak toward shifting power relations? How can form and content mirror one another? These are the questions that Bedford Press problematizes via its elegant and critically engaged platform, that in this case, assumes the form of book.

Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and founding president of Facebook, recently said that with social media “for the first time the three traditional roles held by different parts of media – the production of content, the distribution of content, and the editorialisation around content – its commentary – are now held by everyone on an unprecedented scale, which represents a huge shift in power. Now,“ he continued, “power is held by those creating content, [those] who actually create ideas. To change peoples minds you still have to say something.”

Bedford Press takes this one step further: It collapses not only the production, distribution and editorialisation that Parker references, but design, authorship and editing. What is created is not a completely neutral platform as Parker describes social media – a platform which must be filled with content and ironically alludes to the neutrality of the white cube or frame of the gallery, which was historically stuffed with objects and in which the architecture stood apart from, or over and against, the object – but a new forum in which (plat)form and content stand in direct, mirror relation to one another as co-constitutive. In turn Bedford Press mirrors critical spatial practices -- architectural, artistic, and exhibitionist – in which architecture far from being a spatial container is viewed as co-constitutive, produced and productive, of, within, and through the spatial environment. Artists’ books such as Exhibition Prosthetics explore the book as a primary medium of practice, while taking on contemporary issues of the real and alterity. The Cahiers focus on consensus and politically engaged projects while publications such as Maelfa address specific phenomenon – in this case a defunct shopping mall in Cardiff – to consider larger issues of urban decay and plight.

Such a position becomes paradigmatic ASAP’s mission which no longer seeks to collect mere documentation – a retrospective, referential index that results in a dustbin of history – but proposes modes of practice that are productive and agent to create a polemical, discursive forum. (Plat)form becomes content becomes practice that mirrors architecture’s contemporary state, an expanded field in which work takes on, as Silvia Lavin writes, various guises – a Motley Crew, which in, this case is lead by one with curls.

Bedford Press’s position is in keeping with Kyes' own, in which publishing is viewed as an embedded practice within both graphic design and architecture. Kyes, a Swiss-American graphic designer based in London, joined the Architectural Association as Art Director in 2006 with Wayne Daly joining the AA Print Studio in 2007.

Kyes' practice is known for its critical approach to graphic design encompassing publishing, editing, site-specific projects for and with art institutions. This practice views publications and dissemination as site for debate and exchange rather than documentation. He curated the seminal touring exhibition Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design and is also the founder of Z.A.K. studio in London which has been awarded the Inform Award for Conceptual Design in 2011 and was twice awarded the prize for the Most Beautiful Swiss Books in 2010.