Felix Burrichter was drawing Photoshop illustrations at a corporate New York architecture firm when he decided the field needed a different kind of publication. Born in Düsseldorf, trained in Paris and at Columbia, and inspired by an internship at Butt magazine in Amsterdam under Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers, Burrichter launched PIN-UP in October 2006 with a party behind Saint Patrick's Cathedral — champagne poured by two topless men in construction helmets. The first issue featured Rick Owens showing his furniture designs for the first time, alongside interviews with Zaha Hadid, Daniel Arsham, and the favorite architect of Romanian dictator Ceaușescu.
That eclectic, irreverent, tongue-firmly-in-cheek approach has defined every issue since. PIN-UP calls itself the Magazine for Architectural Entertainment, and the subtitle is not ironic: recent articles have included "Toilet Architecture: An Essay About the Most Psychosexually Charged Room in a Building" and a feature on the clothing-optional Belvedere Guest House on Fire Island — a 1950s TV-scenic-artist's gay castle that no other design magazine had ever covered. The photographer was interrupted more than once by curious onlookers in the buff.
The graphic design has been central from day one. Every issue uses variations of Arial — the most generic font imaginable — as a deliberate provocation, yet no two issues look alike. The Art Directors Club awarded PIN-UP its Gold Medal for Editorial Design in 2011. In 2021, after fifteen years as editor, Burrichter brought on furniture designer Emmanuel Olunkwa to edit the magazine while shifting to creative director. In 2022, PIN-UP and Mattel published Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey — a limited-edition art book that is exactly as serious and as ridiculous as it sounds.
Burrichter once said that with great designers, you can make almost anything look cool — even doilies. That capacity to find the architecture in everything, and to treat it with equal parts scholarship and mischief, is what has made PIN-UP indispensable for nearly two decades.
<a href="https://pinupmagazine.org/">Visit PIN-UP