Blueprint, March 1987 (despite the error in the date on the cover): Philip Johnson, photographed by Phil Sayer, for a special issue on New York
Janet Abrams began her career as a critic at what, in retrospect, seems a very particular moment in the 1980s, a time when there seemed to be a major shift in attitudes toward architecture and design. The first whispers of a reaction against an ascendant post-modernism were already in the air, sometimes with paradoxical results. Feeling insecure, SOM put itself on the couch—and on the lookout for alternatives to corporate modernism. At the first Venice Architecture Biennale, held in 1980, postmodernism’s defining moment, the Strada Novissima—an installation of twenty facades by twenty architects—put Rem Koolhaas on show alongside Michael Graves. Everything was in play, and future directions were still to be defined. Meanings and context seemed as important as plans, appearances, and techniques.
The upstart London monthly Blueprint, founded in 1983 by a group of journalists, photographers, writers, and designers—of which Janet was one and I was another—vigorously attempted to play its own skeptical, Anglo-Saxon part in this process. The magazine set out to be both iconoclastic and disposable, while aiming to root architecture, design, graphics, fashion, and their visual representation in the popular culture of the time. We thought we were going to turn design and architecture upside down. As is usually the case, this took the form of doing all that we could to champion a new group of names, drawn from among our contemporaries. As they rose, so would we. (Now that print has lost much of its authority, we wait with more or less resignation for another generation to dispatch us, in electronic haiku, 140 characters at a time.)
Fashion cycles are the natural means for edging out one generation to make room for another, but they don’t always make for the most reliable of critical judgments. Janet, however, has never been interested in adopting fashionable attitudes. What drives her is the exploration of ideas, and that is what makes her writing compelling reading today. She combines endless curiosity and erudition with a fascination for observation and detail across the broadest cultural spectrum, in a way that might reflect an early interest in the work of the trenchant English critic Reyner Banham, who, like Janet, combined a sharp wit with a determination to extract every scrap of meaning from the smallest of details. Banham, too, made the decision to move to the United States, but his influence was still pervasive at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London when Janet arrived there as an undergraduate student immediately after his departure.
The breadth of her writing shows her ability to engage with some of the most formidable voices of our time, dealing with Peter Eisenman’s bicoastal psychoanalysis and Koolhaas’s first significant completed buildings on her own terms. She has found herself in Los Angeles, talking to Disney’s Michael Eisner, and in a casino designed by David Rockwell, exploring the nature of mapping, play, and craft. Writing, for Janet, is a voyage—a mission to understand, to explain, and sometimes to hold to account. She has the ability to frame complexity in pursuit of clarity.
Janet’s perspective over the years has grown beyond architecture to encompass the wider horizons of design, technology, and their meaning for the world. It follows her professional trajectory, from journalism in London to a doctorate at Princeton University to directorship of the University of Minnesota Design Institute, and then on to an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art— with interludes at the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. It’s a list of institutions and actions like no other, one that reads like a timeline of most of the key developments in design culture over the past four decades. Her writing also reflects the impact of the digital explosion, and the subsequent renewal of interest in the physical and the mark of handwork. That interplay between thinking and doing is what makes her uniquely qualified to explore the nature of the material world against the background of accelerating change.