April 17, 2024 Ι The New York Review of Architecture
As Jeff Meyers, CEO at Zonda, the publisher of Architect Magazine, tells it, there are big things in store for the company’s premier design journal. In an interview with NYRA in early January, Meyers played up a new tech hire brought over from digital-native news site Axios and said the editorial capacity of Architect will be augmented by a twelve-person “cross-functional editorial team,” as well as external “outsourcing.” “We’re really just leveraging the assets of the entire company,” he asserted, into a “merged content strategy.” Of course, the company is retreating from print media; given that Zonda is a “tech-first” company, print is “not something we’re going to support long term,” Meyers said. “It’s not by any means shutting down that particular brand. We’re really just moving the focus to a digital-first strategy.” Web traffic is up, he told me, and ad revenue is ahead of schedule. Meyers expects that Architect will be robust and “growing” in the next two years, a rare boast in the midst of a prolonged media recession.
Recent editorial layoffs at the company were “strictly a strategy move,” Meyers claims. “It’s not like the business isn’t doing very well.” But the good news (for Meyers, I guess) is that Zonda uses “a lot of AI and machine learning in some of our content creation.” Further justifying the layoffs, Meyers says that “given our AI capabilities, we didn’t need as big a team. That’s really what it comes down to. Digitally modernizing media doesn’t always mean more people.” Meyers certainly isn’t the only tech and media CEO looking to use AI to liberate himself from his labor force, but his ambitions seem fairly singular: “I hope to deliver a media platform that people have never seen before.”
But when pressed about how Architect specifically might use AI, Meyers declined to answer. He said I should instead talk to Paul Makovsky, the magazine’s editorin chief. For weeks, Makovsky didn’t return emails, texts, or phone calls, which left me out of luck because, despite what the out-of-date masthead on the magazine’s website says, he is the only editor left at Architect, a publication for which I have written and whose rapid ascent I witnessed firsthand. The rest of the editorial staff was laid off in the fall, and the print magazine was discontinued. As of early January, the rate at which pieces appear on its website has slowed to a trickle of mostly firm-written project briefs, award announcements, sponsored content written by a power utility, and the odd column or two—a flat landscape unmoored from any coherent editorial point of view.
In a story that’s by no means particular to design trade media, past and current staff and contributors have seen Architect sapped of capacity by private equity ownership. Like Makovsky, many people opted not to tell their story, refusing to speak on the record, or at all, for fear of alienating Zonda or hurting future job prospects. Some still worked in roles that maintained business relationships with Zonda, a testament to the company’s deep entrenchment in the building industry.
Under Meyers’s leadership and the ownership of asset managers MidOcean Partners, more than a dozen staff were laid off from Zonda, including three at Architect Magazine, the last print issue of which was the November/December 2023 edition. The sudden change terminated the lucrative agreement Zonda had with the American Institute of Architects as its publishing partner (a relationship both parties had maintained since 2011, when I was an editor at the AIA). The partnership, providing Architect with a robust subscription roll that would be the envy of any design publication, had been renewed in early 2022 and was set to run through the end of this year. Previously, Architect Magazine had been “The Journal of the American Institute of Architects,” and the organization’s nearly 100,000 members received print and digital subscriptions as a member benefit.
A lone editor surrounded by a coven of chatbots marks a depressing dissolution for a magazine that rapidly established itself in a niche marketplace dominated by a century-old titan, Architectural Record. In a trade media context that’s seldom a wellspring of heedless experimentation, Architect quickly forged an astute set of editorial priorities that looked beyond the object fetishism of much of the design media to interrogate how architecture interacted with culture and the economy, even when the resulting synthesis wasn’t attractive, equitable, or functional. Editors brought on top-shelf critics like Witold Rybczynski, Alexandra Lange, Christopher Hawthorne, and Eva Hagberg, balancing news with in-depth project coverage and commentary. Four years after its launch in 2006, it was nominated for an American Society of Magazine Editors General Excellence Award, and four years later it was nominated for a National Magazine Award for a series of Rybczynski columns.
According to past staff and current contributors, much of this success is owed to Ned Cramer, the magazine’s founding editor in chief. Through his fourteen-year tenure, Cramer recalls several distinct phases of media business evolution, but there was a persistent aura of misapprehension from Hanley Wood leadership (the name of the magazine’s publisher before a 2020 rebrand) about the role of the media arm of the company. Though Hanley Wood had a robust suite of building industry publications, it was also a real estate and construction data business, and that seemed to financially outshine the media arm. At the beginning of the AIA publishing deal, the magazine was in a strong position and passed the $1 million ad revenue mark for a single issue, Cramer says. The next five years were generally financially stable. But in the run-up to a sale of Washington, DC–based Hanley Wood from one asset manager to another in late 2018, questions started to arise. “What would the nature be of the purchaser, and would they break the company apart and just hold on to the data portion—which we all knew was where the winds were blowing?” Cramer recalls. “The winds were in their sails, not in ours.” When MidOcean purchased Hanley Wood in December of 2018, it also scooped up Meyers’s eponymous research firm, which focused on homebuilding industry data. (MidOcean Partners assets include companies that specialize in business services, health care, telecommunications, tech, consumer products, and food items like Casper’s Ice Cream, known for their FatBoy ice cream sandwiches and ChurnBaby ice cream treats.)
The sale resulted in a merger between Hanley Wood and Meyers Research, of which Meyers became CEO. He, according to Cramer, is “a data guy,” and with that came “a pretty clear shift in priorities.” The Meyers regime seemed more interested in the company’s residential media properties and most interested in data products. Over time, there was less and less focus on the media wing. A press release announcing the merger did not mention Architect or any specific media brands. In the fall of 2020, when the merged companies rebranded as Zonda, it was named “after the Zonda data product,” and a section of this release on “Media and Awareness” mentioned other publications, like Builder, Multifamily Executive, and Affordable Housing Finance, but not Architect.
The mood, even before the MidOcean Partners acquisition, was consistently tenuous. “Every fall there would be layoffs, and every fall we’d get budgets that were smaller than the one before,” says Greig O’Brien, managing editor at the magazine from 2008 to 2020. “Every year it was, ‘Do more with less.’”
There was the sense, he says, that Architect didn’t translate into the data commodities that ran the operation. “The data company was probably far and away
the most profitable part of the company,” says O’Brien. “They were [moving] more and more to be a data company. Magazines like Builder and the rest of the residential ones probably had a better use case for being able to use some of that [data] than we could. We were talking about designing new museums.”
When the pandemic hit, it crushed events-based revenue that had attempted to pick up slackening ad sales, says Cramer. The publisher responded by reducing the number of print magazines per year, cutting the freelance budget, and jettisoning much of the magazine’s senior leadership, including Cramer and O’Brien who were laid off in mid-2020. The financial outlook was grim. The year-over-year difference in revenue from 2019 to 2020 was “catastrophic” says Cramer, a fraction of what it had been.
For much of Architect’s history, Cramer worked to expand the editorial brand beyond its original print mandate, dedicating staff to producing podcasts, planning events, and assembling continuing education credit programming, chasing the clicks and sponsorships that determine success or failure in the digital media economy. “We’d had to reinvent ourselves twice already,” he recalls. “Ten out of the fourteen years I was there, there was a sense that the ground was moving beneath our feet. At the time I left, it was obvious that we were going to have to do that trick again, and we’d probably have far fewer resources to do it with.”
Even so, he felt like this was a surmountable challenge. “I knew that we could come up with some cool, new incarnation of ourselves that would still serve the audience if the company wanted it. But they just didn’t see it in the same way.” As pressure mounted, there was more emphasis on controlling expenses over the next few months than on the long-term viability of the magazine. It came down to a “stronger imperative around the short-term,” says Cramer. “I can’t imagine it was any other reason.”
It all seemed predestined to Cramer, a treadmill that didn’t need any malevolent actor to set into motion. “I can’t point to any internal villain,” he says. “Given the circumstances, it’s hard to imagine things playing out much differently. It was incredibly sad. I don’t harbor a ton of resentment. I’m grieving.”
“We were owned by private equity,” says O’Brien. “The most profitable thing was never the media side. It was always looking to trim the businesses, making them look good, and selling them off to the next [group of ] people.”
Looking at the print run of the last few years of the magazine, it’s clear that staff hasn’t been given the resources to produce a compelling and substantive read. During this steady dissolution, Architect has been largely absent in social media design discourse, apart from the sharp and progressive criticism exhibited by Anjulie Rao, who hasn’t had a column posted online since the summer.
Blaine Brownell and Aaron Betsky will stay on as columnists at what remains of Architect, extending a tenure for which Brownell says he’s been “incredibly grateful.” Since 2009, Brownell’s coverage of material science and technology has furrowed out a deep and underexamined niche in the design world. “Over my fifteen years in this post, I’ve worked with many remarkable individuals. I credit Hanley Wood and Zonda for hiring first-rate talent to steward an insightful publication,” he says. While some of his editors left of their own accord, “many others have been let go, for reasons I never understood,” he says. “It’s a mystery [as to] what [ownership’s] expectations are of this platform. There’s the bigger question of how all of these staff were just let go and Paul’s expected to manage on his own. We as a design community should hopefully be able to assert more agency over this problem and solve it,” he says. “I think this model is broken. Making architectural journalism a more sustainable career should be a priority for both the AEC and publishing industries.”
Cramer says he hopes to see some type of “communitarian” model emerge for design media, or perhaps a nonprofit structure. (It’s worth mentioning that NYRA is organized as a worker-owned cooperative.) He’s cheering on the idiosyncratic web-based atomization of design attention for its creativity, if not its seemingly inherent precarity. He’s ready to “let the zines rule the world,” he says.
But the zines don’t rule the world. Players like MidOcean Partners, which in April of 2023 whipped up $1.5 billion from investors, do. As ever-larger agglomerations of capital own media organizations, private equity owners have far more money to invest in their properties than the (relative) mom-and-pop media owners of yesteryear. But that’s not what they do. Instead, they opt to strip them for parts and revenue streams until there’s nothing left, discarding jobs, people, and the quality of the product itself, passing the savings on to the richest people in the world. It’s an extraction model no different from any petrostate. For a community newspaper, this decline is easier to measure: in craven landlords run amok, in festering political corruption, n unaccountable power that corrodes our sense of what we owe each other. It’s harder to track the impact of the loss of a design journal, though it’s clear that the breathless hype wafting over, for example, the next greenwashed global megaproject built with slave labor and these same petrostate dollars can seep into any gap left by a shrinking media apparatus.
Meyers’s invocation of AI-powered content generation tells us everything we need to know. Whatever these algorithms might do, they won’t be able to critique the system that created them unless they’re specifically asked to, which sounds like a
bad deal for the people, like Meyers, who are paying for their development. Crowd-sourcing the internet for high-return-on-investment content seems antithetical to seeing the world in new ways (something designers say is important), to say nothing of coming up with something interesting to read.
If Architect Magazine, as O’Brien posited, can’t supply saleable data assets, it appears Zonda will instead dissolve it into a bath of molten data like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s moral—and thus doomed—cybernetic protagonist in the finale of Terminator 2. This may well benefit some people, maybe even some architects. (The house-flipping designer who popularizes the successor Pantone to gentrifier gray will probably love Meyers’s new Architect Magazine). But it won’t be a record of the culture that shapes the built environment. Its total demise, however and whenever it may occur, will be a record of the cheapening commodification that our economy forces on culture