Shifting the Stones of Little Magazines: The Translation and Transformation of Otto Wagner's Moderne Architektur

Proceeding from Manfredo Tafuri’s discussion of historical writing as a process of shifting stones, this paper perceives
all revisionist architectural criticism as an act of mining, to unearth the implications of both the verbal and visual
discourse founded on the modern concept of architecture as language. This mining is particularly evident in the surge
of European to English translations published within post-modern architectural little magazines. For the purposes of
this essay, I examine the case study 9H journal, produced between 1980 and 1995 by a voluntary editorial team of
Master of Science students at the Bartlett School at University College, London (UCL). 9H was one of the first British
little magazines to mine Eurocentric revisionist theory to form international relationships with theorists and practitioners.
In 1983, 9H translated Otto Wagner’s nineteenth-century manifesto ‘Modern Architecture’. A comparison of Wagner’s
original and 9H’s post-modern publication reveal no shifts in verbal language, yet significant transformations in visual
language through the editorials selection of images. Through a historic framework constructed from the writings
of Kenneth Frampton, Roland Barthes and Beatriz Colomina, identifying both the text and the rhetoric of the image
as transmitting linguistic and cultural meaning, this paper seeks to address the following: to what extent does the
interaction of language and images in architectural publication influence the reading of the text? What post-modern
interests did this translation serve through the ways the 9H editorial transformed Wagner’s visual language? Finally,
what is obscured from Wagner’s language through 9H’s visual transformation? This investigation proposes mining
within architectural historiography as a critical method to navigate the discursive formations that emerged within the
counter-culture of mainstream post-modernism, and in a current milieu where the image dominates, it encourages
theorists and practitioners to understand the important connoted meanings embedded in photography and drawing.