Back Issues - Open Letters

Back Issues It's time to follow Annie Choi's example and revive the lost art of the open letter to readers, says Steve Parnell

The marginalia of journals, letters pages in particular, are often more revealing than the features and columns, and expose the real vitality of the times. Just like Columbo's 'one more thing' moment, they are the point at which the viewer sees whodunnit. As one Adrian Jones of London wrote in the Architectural Design of February 1972: 'Sir, your magazine is becoming a big internal postal system going from Peter Cook to Warren Chalk to Cedric Price to God knows who else.'

Stirling was no writer, but neither was he a stranger to letters to the press. In a famous exchange in the Architectural Association Quarterly between Jul/Sep 1972 and Jan/Mar 1973, he fell out with Charles Jencks over the metaphor of his latest building. 'Jencks is all balls,' Stirling writes, 'if he thinks the St. Andrews Residence was designed to look like a ship, any more than a crotch.' Then, between June and December 1974, Stirling had a slightly more restrained rally with ex-partner James Gowan in the Architectural Design, Architectural Review, RIBA Journal and the AJ over the attribution of drawings (or lack thereof) in the James Stirling exhibition at the RIBA Drawings Collection.

One format in particular, which is much missed today, is the open letter to readers. Once, in days of yore, when readers would pen open letters to editors to vent frustration, occasionally a whole article would then be framed as 'an open letter to the readers', such as Robin Thompson's in November 1974's AD.

This genre was rediscovered earlier this year by writer Annie Choi (www.annietown.com) in Pidgin magazine with her (already infamous) 'Dear Architects, I am sick of your shit' letter, which every architect must have received in their inbox at least once this year, and which cut a little too close to the funny bone for many.

I, for one, will be severely disappointed if there are no open letters in 2008.