JoCA 01

Joca 1 Cover

Issue one of the JoCA brings together a series of essays and visual essays that consider the theme of Portrait, or more precisely, the role of "character" in architecture.

The Journal of Civic Architecture includes essays, visual essays, drawings and design projects that relate architecture, photography, literature and criticism to city life. Each issue is edited by Patrick Lynch, and addresses a series of unpredictable themes concerning urban culture and imagination.

Contributions are invited for the forthcoming issues from photographers, writers and designers who wish to engage in a fruitful dialogue with other creative people about the meaning, frustrations and pleasures of civic culture today. Academics are encouraged to send things that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise find an audience. Please contact us if you’ve design projects, writing, or images that you’d like us to consider for publication.

Each issue of JoCA has a limited print run of 500 copies, and is available to purchase from our website, Magma, magCulture, Rare Mags,  Margaret Howell, Charlotte Street News, The Architectural Association Bookshop in London; and at CCA in Montreal, William Stout in Los Angeles, Copyright Books in Ghent, and at Choisi Bookshop in Lugano, amongst others.

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'This first issue of the JoCA, published on Mid-Summer’s Eve 2018, somewhat deliberately brings together a series of themes that might be loosely described as portraiture. The question of architecture as autobiography reveals in fact that the civic character of Pleznik’s cemetery is the fruit of a profoundly emotional and empathetic imagination. Tom de Paor’s Palace cinema is not only the work of a powerfully situational memory, but also, I think, somewhere where the extreme atmospheric character of Galway merges with the dream world of film: an expanded threshold that frames the town as a subject of contemplation.

These, and the other projects, poems and essays in issue 1, locate creative energy in the city, in the everyday world of work and human meaning; suggesting I believe, that communicative cultural expression emerges from these common conditions, revealing them to us anew.'

Patrick Lynch

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