Many possible things to write about at present, all vaguely centred around Architecture and Wellington. We could be writing / discussing the enlarged Civic Square possibilities, or the new Parliament building, or the continued lack-lustre job market, or the fact that population is going down in Wellington while rates are going up, but instead I think it may be more interesting to briefly talk about a new Arch magazine in NZ.

For years now we have had a monopoly, with Architecture NZ being the sole magazine dedicated to Architecture in our fair isles. News on the horizon though, is that this is about to change. There are two other magazines in NZ that also talk architecture, namely HERE and also HOME. Both of these really concentrate mainly on Residential.

HOME is the rebirthed version of what used to be known as Home and Building, whereas HERE sprang up like a daisy during the curious Covid collapse of the print media market way back in 2020. During those dread dark days, a 20 year old upstart URBIS was wiped out, falling by the wayside and vanishing, seemingly without a trace. I’ve completely lost track as to who owns what, or who runs which, or who has written for whatever, wherever, whenever, somehow. But maybe Federico is the glue here?

Both URBIS and Arch NZ were owned by AGM, which since then has been brought out once, twice, maybe three times, and evidently the current owners have been talking about axing Arch NZ in the same manner as they destroyed URBIS. My gut feeling is that the two NZ magazines are looking a little TOO alike – HOME / HERE – similar graphic feel, similar projects, similar colour palette etc.

So, enter a new possible / probable magazine to the market: Architecture Aotearoa. It is being proposed by Federico Monsalve, who is a former editor of both URBIS and also Interior magazines (Interior also disappeared a couple of years back). He is a trained journalist (unlike us amateur writers here at the Fish). I think that he is possibly running HOME at present, and maybe AA in the future. His work has appeared in a range of local and international media including Granny Herald, Monocle, ARTnews etc. Watch out for Architecture Aotearoa on your shelves soon, we need to support both our titles.

There is a curious stand-offishness between the real press world and the pretendy one that the Fish lives in. The Eye of the Fish only exists because of the lack of a local alternative and the beneficent attitude of a Melbourne-based lecturer Philip Belesky, who still pays for the funding of this increasingly large and periodically sluggish website: TheEyeoftheFish.org where I (and you) still hang out. But the real world publishers never acknowledge that we exist. Perhaps we don’t. Maybe I am actually a figment of my own imagination.

It is curious though, to propose to launch a new magazine in the midst of a deep and never-ending recession, in a market segment which is already suffering, with sponsors and advertisers daily falling by the wayside. Overseas magazines do not appear to be suffering as much as us here, and their mags are stuffed with ads for high end goods and services. Particularly pertinent these days when everything appears to be going online, and when both magazine stores and letter boxes are a vanishing breed. I mean, does Wellington actually HAVE a magazine store these days? Magnetix has gone, does the store in the old Post Office Square still exist? Is there anywhere else still alive?

Fish

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