THE NEW TOPOS

BY BRADFORD MCKEE

Image Courtesy Topos Magazine 99.

Readers of the much-beloved magazine Topos will see a striking difference with the newest issue, its 99th, released in mid-June: a front-to-back redesign and editorial overhaul overseen by its editor-in-chief, Tanja Braemer. It is the first redesign of Topos since 2005. The new format, arriving in the title’s 25th year, slices its landscape-driven content in new ways and moves it closer to urban design and planning in its coverage of what Braemer calls “open-space culture.”

“I would like the urban disciplines to be more confident, to be more outgoing, and say, yeah, we are talking about free space,” Braemer said from her office in Munich, where Topos is published by Callwey Verlag, which also produces Garten + Landschaft (of which Braemer is also editor), the venerable architecture title Baumeister, and others. “We want our readers to feel authorized to talk on the same level as architects. We’re trying to impart that we are a discipline that is becoming more important and more appreciated.”

Topos Editor-in-Chief Tanja Braemer. Copyright: Deutsche Fachpresse/Fernando Baptista.

The mission articulates in an enterprising, free-range fashion in the new issue, titled “Wounds.” The new design, created by the magazine’s art director, Heike Wagner, trades the stately hems of the previous version’s white pages for more full-bleed photography to stare at and consider, alternating with entire pages of text. Section-front pages are washed in color (a dusky rose in this issue, though Braemer says the color could change with each issue). The major sections are labeled, progressively, by the symbols for alpha, beta, gamma, and delta. One particularly gutsy change is the use of a serif typeface, Minion Semibold, for story titles. It’s a more exuberant yet moodier magazine, composed in a minor key that gives it added weight.

The “Wounds” theme takes the issue to World War I battlefields in Europe, to Kabul, Sarajevo, Beirut, and the United States-Mexico border. There is one timely essay on the reality of terrorism arriving in European cities and another on the need for high-quality, readily deployable shelter for disaster victims and war refugees. In the front, shorter pieces on parking quotients and on the evolution of Milan bracket a couple of loose, informal profiles of design professionals. Braemer says that each issue’s concept will aim to build a general understanding of urban environments out of specific, personal perspectives—a large statement made of “different levels and angles” to give a topic context and tension.

The new Topos, to be published quarterly in English, will be “transmedial,” Braemer says, with plenty of web content to supplement what appears in the magazine. But a remarkable aspect of this evolution is the faith its editor and publisher express in the print product amid rafts of online platforms animated by urbanism. “Especially in the artistic disciplines, people like to have something in their hands and go through a magazine with big pictures,” Braemer says. “We’re always in a rush on Instagram, on websites, on blogs…but people very much appreciate being able to lean back and have time to go through something up close.”

You can preview nearly two dozen pages of the newly designed Topos at www.toposmagazine.com.