PAPER: How did Fulcrum come about? Was it encouraged by members of staff, both in terms of funding and support?
Jack Self: Fulcrum was founded by three AA students: myself, Aram Mooradian and Graham Baldwin. It was the result of quite a drawn out process. I think the initial desire was basically to begin to engage with the students in our school in a way that was perhaps more immediate or more effective than a blog. We had initially thought perhaps to have some sort of newspaper covering school news but we decided what really interested us was to attempt to do something that wasn’t just insular or just about our school but which tried to address some of the topics in architecture that we thought were interesting. We came up with the idea and pitched it to the student forum along with a couple of different people and in all cases it became quite difficult. The student forum for example didn’t want to edit any of the copy. They wanted people to be able to write and to have it printed immediately, to which we said no, it should be curated and it should be edited as well. The aspiration is to do something as professional as we can, although we’re very proud of it being student run, and that was the idea of it.
As far as members of staff go we’ve had a couple who have taken an interest in the publication but we’ve always felt it was very important not to be too influenced by what members of staff might say. When we were starting out we had a lot of members of staff who gave input but at the end of the day we thought it was important just to follow it up as our own project.
We’re very fortunate as far as the school goes. We were looking for a way to be the most effective as we could with almost no budget and the way we found for that to happen was the Bedford Press, the print arm of the AA. They own a Japanese Risograph Japanese printer and no one was really using it, it was just sitting there. So we struck up a deal to use it for free and as a result all we really had to pay for was paper. Fulcrum costs between £70-£100 per term, so that’s every 10 issues and we print 500 copies of each issue a week which is 5000 sheets of paper per term. Then we are also very fortunate that we asked the webmaster if he’d create a sub domain for us and he carved off a little bit of space. Before I went to the AA I used to do quite a lot of web design so was able to ask friends who used to work in newspapers or in other publications to edit our text then by talking to people who had a lot of graphic design experience and by bringing together a bunch of people with a lot of different skills it sort of culminated in Fulcrum.
P: How important is it to write about architecture as a student, and why is it so difficult to get students to contribute with material?
JS: One of the things we really wanted to do was to create a platform for discussion amongst students in the school and all we could afford was one page, we couldn’t afford a newspaper and we couldn’t get people to write more than a page anyway, especially in the first 10 issues. It was really a struggle to get students to write for us, which was really surprising.
One of our aims from the start was to play on the reputation of the AA to get a really well known architect and place them next to someone who has never written before because by doing that you raise the profile of the person who has never written before and there is a democracy behind the idea of the two articles next to each other. This is one of our primary goals and weirdly the problem has not been getting architects to write but students. I’m often surprised when we email Norman Foster and he replies but I email people in my class and I get nothing. It’s a strange dynamic in that sense but we’ve had a lot of difficulty as far as the importance of student writing. Architecture is not just about buildings it’s a more complex profession and a good part of it is to critically reflect on the ideas and the arguments behind the way we make buildings and I think it’s very important when you are a student to explore written arguments in a way you can’t when you are in practice or working and so it’s quite a rare opportunity as part of your education and as part of your development and self expression to write when you are a student. This is also one of the reasons to why we started Fulcrum, to provide students with a platform. I think the sad thing is that it seems to be the same percentage within any university, and the more universities I go to the more I’m convinced of this, which is that about 10% of any year group or any university are really engaged with what it is they are doing and the rest arrive, check in, do their degree and check out. A lot of people I see that are like this are quite shocked when they graduate and they are not sure where to go next. Education is not really about getting a degree it’s about improving your mind, forming connections with other people and exploring a topic you are interested in. Part of that needs to be self initiated activities. I think being involved in a publication doesn’t have to be the written word it could be images it could be your own personal way of engaging with a subject beyond what is required by a course. I think this is fundamental to your education.
P: We are constantly told that architecture is primarily a visual language and have noticed that many students seem to fell that writing is less important due to this. Would you agree that writing is just as important as drawing?
JS: I think you’re right. I think that writing is particularly important, as it’s almost a type of architecture, a way of thinking about architecture is to write. I can’t draw, if I could draw I probably wouldn’t write. It’s not about the way in which you express yourself its just the idea that you are not simply thinking about architecture while you are at school, you are thinking about it in a broader sense of how it is you might contribute to the domain in general and how it is you might develop your own thinking about it. What is really nice is when you work quite hard to setup something like a publication that people can write for and people are writing to us saying we have an idea for a topic or even just more generally writing in saying how can I help. One of the problems even in an architecture course, which is already 5 years or more, is that publications tend to come and go so quickly that it’s very difficult to get enough critical mass to really push something.
Fulcrum is a weekly architectural publication printed on Bedford Press at the Architectural Association. It was founded in January 2011 by Graham Baldwin, Aram Mooradian & Jack Self.
JS: It is surprising how dry the approach of many tutors can be. Maybe it is a question of imagination. It is strange to say this about people in architecture who should have the finest imaginations, yet it’s surprising how people can’t imagine something until you show it to them. It’s something I’ve had before in offices when dealing with clients. You describe something to someone and show them a 3d image, a representation of how it might look and only once it’s built they understand completely. If you can only imagine things that are real this is going to be a very difficult type of profession and it’s surprising when you say to someone we want to do a publication that the student body really can’t even properly grasp what it is you’re trying to say until you’ve started printing it and started putting it in their hands. Then suddenly that transforms. The first 20 issues of Fulcrum were a real uphill struggle, people wouldn’t submit on time, no one was really interested in it and we had enormous difficulties with our print deadlines. Eventually little by little you get systems in place and it was really only after 30 issues that it began to become a bit easier for us, but even so there are portions of a month, 4 issues at a time, that are just a nightmare. I’m going through a period now where I have no idea what will be printed next week because none of the people who I had asked to write had written what they said they would. You’re in this constant deadline and rush to print and that’s after people are able to look on your website and see 50 issues, so when you’re starting out it’s very difficult.
P: It’s rather impressive that each issue of Fulcrum has it’s own theme.
JS: Often though, especially in the early issues we would over commission too many articles so we would ask three of four people to write for one issue and we wouldn’t know what the topic was about but once we got the articles together we would group them in such a way that we could give it some sort of name. I think in a way it’s quite nice to see other students who are doing other work because it shows you what the possibilities might be and we looked at quite a few different publications throughout time. There was a really amazing publication at the AA in the 1970s called the Ghost Dance Times. Part of the story of how Fulcrum is founded is that I showed this to the student forum as a reference and they picked it up and started re-printing it exactly. They had this terrible problem where the quality of the copy wasn’t as high and they also wanted to imitate the fact it was done on a newsprint, which was super expensive and it ran for about 3 issues and stopped. However in the 1970s the newsprint was the cheapest way of printing it and the guy who was running it, Martin Paulie, was just an amazing writer and every single issue was incredibly witty. He does parodies of Charles Jencks and it’s very well done. When you see something of that high quality and you think that’s done by a third year student it really inspires you to try and do something as well and there’s a lot of other people in the UK whose modes of practice have been inspirational to us.
I once worked with a guy called Dele Adeyemo who now runs a firm called Pidgin Perfect in Glasgow, which in the post 2008 architectural landscape is pretty bleak. He’s been very creative in the way he approaches architecture and he’s extended it beyond the idea of the desire to build buildings. He’s increasingly working with societies, communities and maybe the solution to their problems is not a building, maybe it’s something which is an intervention in space but which may not be permanent or constructed. That way of thinking about architecture is very important for us as well. To say that architecture doesn’t necessarily have to be a publication where every article is about a building. We can take topics that may not even seem wholly related to architecture and use them as a way to think about the types of buildings we’re designing in studio. That was definitely one of our ideas but at the end of the day it requires so much energy and so much time to create student publications that it’s a very difficult activity.
P: You mentioned that the goal is to publish 100 issues and that there is an aim to create a permanent interest in student publications rather than Fulcrum being a permanent feature of the school. Is this still one of your objectives?
JS: Yes that’s still the idea. Who knows if we’ll get to 100. I don’t know if the AA is going to keep funding Fulcrum and we negotiate it on a 10 issue basis. We had permission to go up to 50 issues and hopefully in the new academic year we’ll be able to keep going, but who knows. The idea is that at the end of the 100 issues I’ll be at the end of my fifth year and I don’t think that when you start something like this it should go beyond the length of time the founders are at the university. I think it’s very difficult and at the end of the day we’re students not professional journalists. The way in which we would start a publication is very much to have an effect on our peers but then I think every publication is different and the intention behind each one is different. I was talking to Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG a few weeks ago for Fulcrum and what we were talking about is the fact that there seems to be a lack of new independent blogs. We were discussing why that might be and at least for me I think his point about the corporate expansion of blogs is very true. In my case, because I also used to run a blog, and for me the most successful blogs are the ones that have a very tight focus. They set out to talk about something such as 19th century hospitals that were made out of brick and then it’s only that stream of thought. By the same idea Fulcrum is definitely designed to be very focused. If you set yourself 100 issues then you put pressure on yourself by saying: well every issue has got to count, we’re not just going to print anything, we’re really going to try and make something good out of it and I think that focus is very important. I also think that Fulcrum, at least for me, is and extension of blogs and for me it was a way to take the idea of a blog, which is to basically communicate with a very distinct circle of people who you want to engage with and have responses from, and take that out of the internet and put it into the physical world which is increasingly difficult but also increasingly easy. I think in a way it’s easier to have a student publication today and have it printed, than what it was say 20 or 30 years ago and certainly we explored a lot of different options before hand. Before Fulcrum started I ran another very small publication called Entropic Landscapes that ran for 7 issues and that was basically done without any computers. It was written on a typewriter and then photocopied on a Xerox and you could produce 100 or 200 copies of which consisted of 8 pages. You could do that for around 4p a copy by creatively using the fact that the photocopier was subsidized. I do think there’s a possibility today to make physical things that have more of an impact and easier today than it was in the past, as long as you have a real reason for making something physical and in our case it was simply the immediacy. It was the idea that you could put it in front of someone, at the entry of the school, in the studio and that people could pick it up and it wasn’t a precious object.
P: How important is it that the publication is a weekly free newsletter rather than a bimonthly, more elaborate magazine that costs £5?
JS: The fact that the magazine was free was very important to us because it’s hard enough to get people to read anything, especially if you have to pay for it. The whole mechanism for charging someone for a student newspaper was very difficult so we had a couple of factors that came together. The first was by constantly trying to work out how to do it as cheap as we could we were able to give it away for free, which was important to us. The other thing was that we couldn’t really afford to do more than one sheet a week. There are 900 students at the AA and we picked 500 as a fairly arbitrary number, we had no idea how popular it would be and if people would pick it up. We didn’t keep any back issues from the first 10 and most of them ended up going but now we try to keep 50 issues a week back from that 500 so we can give them away later to authors or to other people. Depending on the week we might have a few more but mostly they all go and I don’t think that would be the case if you had to pay for it.
Part of our format of the two columns with the line down the centre was that on any one subject always present two points of view. Architecture publications in general tend to put forward their view as being absolute. Architects have very strong opinions and if someone has a very strong opinion and is quite well known it can be somewhat intimidating to write an article next to it. So by putting them on an equal level was the idea that within every subject we come to it evenly and that there’s always multiple points of view. That kind of format is determined by what we could afford which was a single piece of paper and although we did experiment earlier on with having articles on the back we eventually settled with the idea of only one sheet. We would have two articles on the front and a full image on the back, the idea of the image was that we thought we would get students to design the image and perhaps people who didn’t want to write but still wanted to be involved could think about doing a drawing for the back. Unfortunately just as we had a hard time getting people to write articles for the front we had and even harder time getting people to do drawings for the back so we mostly ended up designing them ourselves. Although we did have one issue where we had two New Zealand graphic designers writing to us out of the blue, and we were very fortunate that they did an image for the back of it. Generally the motivation is definitely to do something for free. I think that’s the only way you can really hope to communicate with people.
Life After Fifty. Jack Self and Graham Baldwin lecturing at the University of Westminster
together with PAPER collective.
P: Fulcrum is discussing a lot of different themes with contributions ranging from various students to renowned architects such as Norman Foster. Is the publication seen in the AA as a platform to students to voice their opinions, and what has been the response so far?
JS: It’s difficult to tell how much of an impact Fulcrum has had on the AA. What’s really strange is that we have many more readers online. We have, depending on the week, anywhere between 2000 and 5000 readers online each week and only print 450 copies at the AA. So we get much better feedback and end up having much more interesting conversations with people who aren’t from the AA, and that has also been interesting. One of my greatest wishes is that more students would write to us and say we want to write something for it because that’s really the aspiration, to print student work right next to really famous people. This term we’ve had two issues where we were supposed to print someone well known next to a student, and the person that was well known wrote their article and the student didn’t, so we had to print just the well known person and that was quite disappointing. What we want to do is promote young writers and when young writers can’t get their act together it’s quite disappointing.
P: We have also had interest from professionals and staff but when you don’t have the same amount of students it looks unbalanced.
JS: When the new academic year starts I want to send an email to the whole student body telling them what Fulcrum is. My hope is that after 50 issues people will take it seriously enough to really be involved in it and in the coming term I’m not so interested in having professionals write, I really want to focus on students because I feel like Fulcrum has lost its way a little. This coming week we have an issue by Mario Carpo who is one of my idols and a really brilliant writer. I am very proud that I am in a position where I am able to email him and he would be interested in contributing. The reason for doing it is to talk to people who are in your own age and work out what they think about architecture. I guess you have to constantly walk that line and I think you loose a kind of legitimacy if you’re only concentrating on people who are already in practice or only professionals.
P: A lot of people in universities are already having these discussions about architecture.
JS: Everyone has an opinion but no one wants to write 500 words. The thing about Fulcrum is that the printer we have works best if you use Japanese paper formats, which because of the small page size means you only have 550 words per article. I thought this was a good length because it’s like a long blog post or a really short essay, but yes it’s been difficult to get people enthusiastic about it.
P: It’s nice to see that you kept on going and to publish something on a weekly basis is impressive.
JS: I have no idea why we decided to do it weekly. I think it’s because this publication from the 70’s was weekly and I also think it was because no one else was producing something weekly. We like the immediacy of it, you can have a high turnover and have a lot of different people involved. The academic year at the AA is only 30 weeks long, that way you can put forward 60 writers every year whereas if we were to do it one a month or once a fortnight it would be a lot less. It’s taken up so much of my energy. Basically I focus on studio and on Fulcrum. I think that’s true for the other people that work on Fulcrum as well. All of my other subjects have suffered quite a lot, I guess I’m less concerned about getting a really good mark for my degree if I feel like I got something really valuable out of it. If you put yourself out there and people respond and engage with it, you end up meeting people that you would never had met otherwise. You end up with opportunities and doing things that you would have never imagined before hand. That for me is the real value of the education, more so than getting really good marks.
P: In the end your grades are quickly forgotten and when you get into practice they virtually mean nothing.
JS: People are very enthusiastic, and what’s really nice about it personally is the fact that it is possible to write to these authors and to engage with them is that I would have no reason to write to someone like Geoff Manaugh unless I wrote Fulcrum and the ability to engage with someone whose work you admire is a privilege. People are very generous with their time and it inspires me to be more generous with my time. We’ve published articles by students who are very enthusiastic, but have never written anything before. They might be very nervous about writing and I try to take a lot of time to work that through with them how to write their article because people have been so kind with their time to us. I think it encourages me to give as much time as possible to other people and it promotes a good working attitude.
P: How has being affiliated with the AA had an effect on Fulcrum?
JS: The reputation of the AA is both a blessing and a curse. The AA is just an architecture school like many other architecture schools and the more schools I go to the more I realise they’re basically all the same. Some invest much more in their PR and in trying to bolster their reputation. Others are more concerned about their academic programs. On one hand it’s been great being at the AA, on the other hand is a very closed world. It starts to believe its own hype sometimes and starts to think it’s elite, which is not helpful for the students because they’re not engaging with anything outside of the AA. That’s not helpful for me as a student because I’m interested in meeting other interesting people and to think you would just do that at your own university is ridiculous. It took us a while to really think about putting Fulcrum online and we didn’t start a website until we were on issue 14 but the idea was quite strong for us. We would scan what we had and put it up online and it was precisely so that I could send it to my friends in Australia. It’s not an elite thing, it’s not a self-contained thing, it’s not just for the AA. It’s so I can have these types of discussions with you, precisely so I can engage with the people who are outside the AA and who are also working on their own projects so we can extend that dialogue outside of one university.
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Jack Self is editing Fulcrum, currently studying at the AA and was interviewed by PAPER collective on Skype on Friday 8th June 2012.
www.fulcrum.aaschool.ac.uk
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