Shortly before its 20th anniversary came the abrupt end for Daidalos. A drastic decline in advertising revenue meant its publisher, Bertelsmann AG, could no longer support two trade magazines dedicated to architecture. Despite a noticeable increase in its circulation, Bertelsmann chose to discontinue Daidalos in order to ensure the continued existence of Bauwelt, its weekly magazine that enjoyed a greater circulation. At the time, companies increasingly preferred to place their advertisements in more popular magazines rather than in specialised journals. A considerable proportion of advertising also migrated online. The weekly print magazine Bauwelt was soon to be accompanied by the online portal Baunetz. Phenomena of the longue durée and far-reaching retrospectives completely fell by the wayside. There was also a reorientation of publishing policy at the company. Although its executive board had announced that it intended to become the international leader in trade magazines, in 1998 its newly appointed chairman declared this goal to be illusory and outdated. Daidalos was abandoned by Bertelsmann in that same year. That its next life under a British publisher, Gordon & Breach, only lasted for two years was mostly the result of the financial crisis at the time in Asia, where the publisher had most of its business. Its management felt it was inevitable that they had to bid farewell to a number of its European commitments.

Promotion instead of criticism

Daidalos's end was not an isolated case, but a symptom of profound changes within the field of publishing as a whole. Whereas in the 1990s, the production of one issue of Daidalos involved ten people from five different professions, by the end one person alone had to manage the entire workload, with a dwindling salary. The accelerating process of digitalisation caused a veritable extinction of trade magazines across the industry. Of the plethora of architectural publications of that era, the ones that still remain are a few glossy magazines that focus on the glamour of photography and magazines funded by universities or cultural institutions. For the few that held their own on the free market, this development prepared the ground for the practice in which renowned architectural firms could dictate what was published. Independent critique in a public forum was replaced by an elegant form of self-representation of individual actors, who took notice of each other only as competitors, and which today still lacks the mutual and productive exchange of experience. This new publishing routine for architecture and urban design no longer provides a platform for a discussion that involves different convictions and attitudes. There is hardly any space for the public, critical reflection on the discipline – and that which does exist is largely limited to the feuilletons of a few newspapers.

Nevertheless, there is no shortage of problems and material, which would form a kind of educational process for the political consideration, in a democratic sense, of the field – a field that affects us all to a greater extent than almost any other field. Physical events, such as building exhibitions and experimental laboratories would help to find out what measures should be taken to intensify building activity so that it becomes more sustainable and reflects society and its desires for ways of living in future. A revival of architectural journals such as Daidalos would also help to bring together the competing actors and contending voices and make them accessible to the general public. The role of such journals would be to detect tendencies and to stimulate and steer a discourse within the discipline, making its development legible while preserving traditional knowledge.

Assignments of architecture

In the editorial department of the printed edition of Daidalos, we always sought to take a step back from current events that Bauwelt journalistically covered and to look at the big picture, but not only in the socio-political or art-historical sense. We also wanted to look at architecture anthropologically and epistemologically and draw historical comparisons. Each issue contained a collection of articles on a theme that combined topicality and history. The perception of designed spatial structures, the self-perception and subject formation of people as bodies moving in space, and the spatial dimension of society's formation are research fields which are today more relevant than ever. One of the central conflicts arises from the contradiction between the all-pervasive growth logic of capitalist economies and the finite nature of space as a resource. With its manifold consequences, such as food shortages, water shortages, wars over resources, migration and rising sea levels, the climate crisis leads to the polarisation of societies and causes governments distress. To the extent that the destructive effects of postmodern capitalism become unmistakable, the practice of designing and building must also put up with being entangled in an intensified need for justification. In this, sustainability is the keyword. It is possible that in the future, architecture will not only regain a greater ecological and socio-political significance, but also will have to play a part in shaping our worldview, guiding our perception and helping illuminate the political dimensions of knowledge. As the most durable object of utility, architecture is an essential part of the collective memory of a society and thus advances to become an important bearer of its history and identity.

The simultaneity of history

When people currently discuss how to save materials in construction projects by reusing as much as possible for the new building or by integrating existing building fabric into the new building in a mindful way, this ambition draws attention to the unrecognized fact that the newly built represents only a small part of the overall built environment at any given time. By far the greater part consists of buildings and infrastructure created by previous generations and inherited from past eras which are adapted as required to changing needs. Or they may simply, without being adapted, continue to be used in a way that is different to their original purpose, and in this way, form a new ensemble. In cathedrals one finds the ambivalence of memory and forgetfulness, the simultaneity of the ability to preserve history with the ability to absorb memory, as is inherent in the urban ensemble as a whole. AA It is particularly clear from them that we do not actually perceive the supposedly disturbing contamination as a fault, or something we have trouble in conceptually grasping. As buildings whose construction required whole epochs to complete, so that generations passed through their building sites, cathedrals lack stylistic uniformity and formal consistency between their elements, without us missing such things. The portal does not necessarily have to match the masonry, the column order does not have to match the vaults, and the westwork does not necessarily have to match the side aisles. In our perception, its heterogeneous parts nevertheless form a whole – even the epitome of a whole – and all the more so the more that discrepancies remain visible, that somehow hasn't tried to putty the fractures and glue the cracks. We seldom experience efforts of unification and purification as a blessing, but mostly as a violent and intellectually and sensually undemanding and therefore as disconcerting interventions, to the detriment of its overall appearance.

In architecture, the new does not replace that what came before. Each epoch enters with its ideas of form into a confrontation with an existing chaos, which in turn is the sum of preceding disparate forms. Like the parts of the cathedral, the elements of the city and the architecture as a whole, viewed with benevolence, resemble a society of tolerant individuals who bear no grudges against each other in terms of their origins and religion and age. Just as Honoré de Balzac observed that we accept and enjoy urban society by entering into partial contact with any number of others, without having to know in each case what motives and biographies we are dealing with, so the buildings of a city enter into contact with one another without regard to their origin and the intention underlying them.1 Often the resulting hodgepodge is not even the aggregate of completely realised concepts, but of projects that got stuck halfway through and of fragmented remnants of abandoned concepts. Architecture transforms this temporal succession into a spatial juxtaposition of the non-simultaneous and the intentionally divergent. BB

Permanence and integrity

In contrast, art historians, as Rosalind E. Krauss mockingly puts it, think like scholastics, namely in successive typologies and in revisions.2 They see the world through the eyes of old men, looking at it with that stubbornly backward-looking gaze that searches for proven safe stepping stones in the form of precedents, for ladders on which one can slowly and laboriously climb up to the present. Architectural history, thanks to the orientation towards this still-authoritative 19th-century model, is understood as the chronological list of important master builders and the stringing together of buildings according to the date of their completion, roughly gridded in style epochs. The arrangement of the architects and their works and the styles depicts the history of architecture in the form of that "imaginary museum" that André Malraux (1901-1976) and Jean Tardieu (1903-1995) spoke of, in which it is suggested that the city is completely rebuilt with each change of style, in each epoch, although everyone knows that this is not so.3

The history of architecture and the city can be conceptually approached if one sees the central analytical concept for historicity not in what is new and changing, but in what is retained and remains the same, only changing in a moderate way and integrating what is left behind. The school of historians around Henri Pirenne (1862-1935)4, who contributed the concept of “permanence” to the discourse as a core concept of historical consciousness, wanted to see it applied primarily to institutions and organisms. However, it can easily be transferred to architecture and thus reveals its true viability, as Pierre Lavedan (1885-1982) and Enrico Guidoni (1939–2008)5, in particular, have shown with regard to the persistence of certain structures in the transformations of the European city since Roman antiquity. Remaining patterns of Cardo and Decumanus or foundation walls of ancient theatres and arenas can still be found in the street patterns of European cities. They testify to a simultaneity that Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) was also fascinated by in his morphological analyses of cities.CC The physical experience and interrogation of the built environment as a witness to the permanence of history in the "Pirennian" sense represents an essential component of architectural self-renewal and self-reflection. This corresponds closely with the fact that we experience the demolition of structures as an attack on our own integrity.

Architecture does not disappear without causing other things to shake along with it. Architecture not only supports collective memory, it establishes it. Nurturing this role and helping it to become more prominent is a task that Daidalos has never shied away from. As a digital magazine for architecture, art and culture, which as a non-profit organization tries to escape the laws of the free market and constraints of publishing, Daidalos is now allowed to stand up for the principle of permanence in the sense of keeping present past solutions for still unknown problems with great freedom and persuasiveness. As an open forum for critical discourse, the online platform not only functions as a memory of ideas, it will also continually make this archive accessible to new generations of readers. With this certainty, I look forward to the digital rebirth of Daidalos and wish those involved courage and instinct in their choice of topics and an ever-growing audience.