Dennis Dollens

SITES was a periodical I used to read in the library back in architecture school in the early 1990s, so each time I come across an issue of SITES at a used bookstore I tend to buy it. The other day I found issue 24, which is graced by one of Chuck Hoberman's folding structures and mentions a Toyo Ito essay ("On Fluid Architecture"), probably to entice people to plop down $15 for the issue — quite a bit of coin more than 25 years ago. Besides the Hoberman and Ito contributions, which take up nearly 30 of its 120 pages, there are mainly New York-centric projects (by Douglas Darden, Smith-Miller + Hawkinson, Taeg Nishimoto, and others) and lots of book reviews that stand out from the rest. With projects in abundance on the internet today but book reviews lacking, it's always refreshing to see such inquisitive thoughts in the latter camp. They make periodicals such as SITES and Design Book Review worth buying (for me, at least) all these decades later.… (más)

Over the last few days I've been getting emails from various non-profits (Storefront for Art and Architecture, Van Alen Institute, Architectural League) about NYSCA Grants, which are annually given out by the New York State Council on the Arts to proposals in architecture and other fields. I teamed up with the Design Trust for Public Space one year to get a grant for my NYC Guide, but alas I didn't get one. Nevertheless, I hold those grants in high esteem, partly from the quality of projects that are assembled in this book from the years 1988 to 1992. I did not get this book until a few years ago, but I knew much of the work, probably since these grants were a step toward being published and therefore spreading the work to more people. A number of the projects found their way into Oz Journal, an annual publication from the architecture school at KSU that was fortunate enough to co-edit one year. Blogs and other digital publications have supplanted this sort of book, but I really like seeing the fruits of the NYSCA Grants in one place, much of it by architects and designers on the cusp of doing something greater.… (más)

Just how much architectural publishing (and publishing in general) has changed in the last 20 years can be grasped by opening to the first page of this issue of SITES, a skinny architecture periodical I used to browse in the library at architecture school. On the inside of the front cover are ads for two bookstores – Perimeter Books and Jaap Reitman, Inc., both in New York – that have both closed since this issue's publication in 1993. One more page into the issue are ads for William Stout and Urban Center Books; only San Fran's Stout survives as Urban Center closed in 2010. So three of the four bookstores advertising in SITES no longer exist, nor does SITES. This is not entirely a coincidence, as independent publications and outlets for them depend on each other. These days, print-on-demand publications offer the equivalent of Dollens' journal, which makes sense since the marketplace has shifted to the Internet. Ironically, decades after its initial publication, online is where I purchased a used copy of SITES 25.… (más)