ArchitectureWeek

» see architectureweek.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Architecture is not my field and an architecture trade weekly out of Eugene, Oregon was never going to be, so I came at this one the way you come at a building you walk past: from the outside, looking at what is still standing. What is still standing turns out to be the interesting part.

ArchitectureWeek was founded in May 2000 and published its first issue on the 17th. It was run by Artifice, Inc., a small Oregon outfit whose editor in chief was Kevin Matthews, and it covered buildings and the culture around building for an audience of working architects. Over the years more than a hundred authors wrote for it. It was wired into Artifice's other properties, principally the Great Buildings collection, a library of photographs and architectural drawings that predated the magazine, and Archiplanet, a wiki meant to hold an entry for every building and every builder.

Issue No. 583 went out on 3 December 2014. It carried a piece by Joseph Tanney and Robert Luntz of Resolution: 4 Architecture about the Bronx Box, a prefabricated infill house at the foot of the Throgs Neck Bridge, built for a veteran of the Iraq war on a narrow lot that FEMA flood rules had forced nine feet into the air. That is the last thing ArchitectureWeek published. No farewell editorial went with it, and nobody outside wrote about the ending either.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ nine years on the same page ~

The site did not go down when the magazine stopped. The front page kept serving No. 583 with its date on it, and it was still doing that in the summer of 2023, with the Facebook and Twitter embed scripts loading in the markup and a Tweets by @archweek widget trying to fill itself. The file's own Last-Modified header on the final capture reads 21 November 2019, which is somebody touching the template five years after the last issue, for reasons nobody wrote down.

The Internet Archive's last capture of the host is 12 August 2023. After that there is nothing, on the bare domain or the www one, which is what the archive's record looks like when a name stops resolving rather than when a server starts returning errors. The Wikipedia article notices this in a single line saying that since 2024 the website is no longer reachable, and still describes Kevin Matthews in the present tense as the current editor in chief.

~ what else was on that server ~

Great Buildings was the valuable thing and it went down with the rest. For most of the 2000s it was one of the better reference collections on the web for architectural photography, with maps and bibliographies attached to each entry, assembled by editors making choices rather than scraped. A student could get a drawing of a building out of it in 2005 when the alternative was a library.

Both of the external links at the bottom of the Wikipedia article now point into web.archive.org, dated 2023.

~ the arithmetic of a weekly ~

583 issues across 14 years is about 42 a year, which means the schedule slipped a lot near the end and nobody made a fuss about it. A weekly trade magazine is a treadmill: the editor who stops has to either announce it or let the last issue stand, and letting it stand costs nothing until the hosting bill does. For nine years the page said the same thing every time anyone looked, which is a long time for a publication to be dead and still answering.

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