22-07-24 // 20 YEARS OF INDEPENDENT THINKING – INTERVIEW WITH BERND UPMEYER

Photo by William Alatriste that was featured in MONU’s very first issue in 2004
as part of the article “Is a Bathtub Still a Bathtub on Mars?”

20 Years of Independent Thinking
Interview with Bernd Upmeyer

Anda Zota: How did you start a magazine on urban phenomena? What was then – and what is now – the aim of the magazine?
Bernd Upmeyer: I started MONU around 20 years ago with the intention of creating a platform for the exchange of ideas, independent thinking, and as a board for debate. This excited me at the beginning and it still interests me today. The idea to create a board on which discussions and creative processes can take place fascinated me to such an extent that I even called my architecture office, that I founded in Rotterdam only shortly after the creation of the magazine, “BOARD”, which is an acronym for “Bureau of Architecture, Research, and Design”. Ever since then, I create MONU with the help of this office, which functions as a platform for many diverse activities on its own.

AZ: Are you still in touch with your colleague from university, with whom you founded the magazine? How does it feel now to debate urbanism on such a large platform, since the magazine got quite successful over the years?
BU: Yes, I am still in touch with some of my colleagues from university. I feel a lot of gratitude that MONU is appreciated and is considered successful. It means a lot to me and I am very thankful that I can be part of it, as I consider myself rather a contributor than the sole creator of the magazine. I certainly initiate the topics, keep the fire burning, and put everything together in a decent layout, but without the ever-ongoing interest of other very creative, talented, and intelligent people who contribute too, the magazine would be unimaginable.

AZ: Why do you think urban phenomena are still niche subjects? Why do neither architects nor public administration officials publicly discuss and debate urbanism?
BU: Because urban phenomena are not impacting, stimulating, or touching the lives of people as much as topics such as politics, the economy, sports, or culture. But if urban phenomena appear in articles together and in a mix with articles on these general-interest topics in publications, like in newspapers, they reach larger audiences too, leaving behind their niche situation. Here in the Netherlands – but I also know this from Germany, Belgium, and France – urbanism is publicly discussed and debated quite a lot. I experienced this especially in France when I took part with my office BOARD in the Atelier International Grand Paris (AIGP), in which public debates on the urbanism of Paris were organized in which mainly architects took part, but also members of the French Ministry of Culture.

MONU’s first issue from 2004 next to MONU #37 from 2024

AZ: What struggles did you encounter with the magazine over the years? How did the magazine change?
BU: As we always wanted to remain independent, the biggest struggles over the years were mostly related to the economic aspects of the magazine. It is certainly great that you perceive MONU as a fairly large and successful magazine, but this can only be valid in relation to its reputation, appreciation, and meaning, but not in relation to its circulation and economic success, which is in comparison to newspapers or magazines that focus on general-interest topics, tiny. But we always tried over the years to avoid these challenges impacting the quality of the magazine, which we constantly aim to improve. To overcome these struggles we had to force ourselves to cut down our own hours that we put into the magazine in order to have more time for other projects that are financially more sustainable. The recent reduction to one issue per year instead of two and the fact that we are still printing mainly in black-and-white has to do with that aspect too.

AZ: Does the idea of a magazine (of an ephemeral publication, of flipping through the magazine) stand in contrast to MONU’s serious table of contents and tone of voice?
BU: What you seem to perceive as serious about MONU is what I am interested in to read myself and what I am therefore interested in as the editor of a magazine we publish. But I believe there are far more serious magazines than MONU on the market, just think about some philosophy or science magazines, which are at times pretty hard to read and thus fairly inaccessible, even for experts in the field. Thus I do not perceive MONU to be in competition with other magazines; it rather complements the broad range of diverse forms and types of periodical publications that are needed in an increasingly diverse society to communicate issues that are relevant and necessary for our lives and our living together.

AZ: What other publications (in print) do you find interesting?
BU: As an architecture student I loved reading architectural history and theory magazines that were accessible for free in our university library. Their topics complemented ideally the content that was taught and especially not taught at my faculty at that time. Today I am more into reading newspapers on the one hand, or entire books on the other, currently a lot on both western and eastern philosophy.

AZ: What are some of the subjects you’re planning on investigating in your future issues?
BU: One of our future subjects will be “conflicts” and their impact on architecture and cities. Currently we are working on a new MONU issue on this topic, which will be published in October this year under the title of “Conflict-driven Urbanism”. We felt that it was necessary to focus an issue on conflicts as it became ever clearer to us that the pandemic, due to its power to reveal the massive economic and social inequalities in our cities, triggered an enormous number of conflicts culminating in mass protests in cities around the world, as we demonstrated in MONU #34. But today we know that this was just the start of our troubles as we have just entered a new era of conflict. And how these rising conflicts are shaping and influencing cities and buildings we will be revealing in MONU #37 soon.

Title: 20 Years of Independent Thinking
Author: Bernd Upmeyer
Date: July 2024
Type: Commissioned interview
Publication: igloo architecture magazine, #220
Location: Bucharest, Romania
Interviewer: Anda Zota