Forty Under 40: Media

Felix Burrichter | Architect and magazine editor | 30 | New York City

As the founding editor and creative director of Pin-Up, a "magazine for architectural entertainment," Felix Burrichter has combined fashion, sex, design, photography, and contemporary art editorial, all under the auspices of architectural theory. Architecture, he says, often gets wrapped up in its own pretension, and his magazine's sensibility is emancipating. Smart, offbeat analyses, interviews, and photo stories are wrapped in a succinct design that resembles the clean geometry of a Bauhaus-era art journal with the campy pastiche of a JCPenney catalog and the subversion of weekly escort advertisements. The title itself is also a clever hybrid, referencing both the heyday of erotic publications and the casual term for academic architectural critique.

"I kind think of Pin-Up as a guilty pleasure for architects," he says of the biannual magazine, which is winning favor with nonarchitects as well. "The majority of the architect profession is so hypermasculine. There's a concept of the alpha-male architect that I personally never fit into."

The profession has certainly seen its share of ego imposed by an unofficial cadre of straight white males, but Burrichter muses that this fraternity might evolve when more socially liberated junior architects come into positions of creative influence and helm their own firms. Until then, Burrichter will do his best to make blueprints blush red.