Part of Culture: Writer Marianela D'Aprile on Making Architecture Less Rarefied and Getting Better at Thinking
Marianela by Taylor Emrey Glascock.
By Julia Gamolina
Marianela D’Aprile is a writer living and working in New York City. Since March of 2022, she has served as the deputy editor of the New York Review of Architecture, where she contributed to transforming the publication into a semi-monthly review. Her writing is broad-ranging but generally focuses on the overlap between culture and society; she’s written about film, literature, art, and architecture for outlets such as n+1, The Nation, and Jacobin. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Marianela talks about her writing goals for herself, advising those just starting their careers to focus on one step at a time.
JG: It's been so cool to see the evolution of NYRA these past five years, and of course you've had a big role in this. What are you most focused on highlighting for 2024? What are the most important themes for us as readers to be paying attention to?
MDA: One of the things that makes NYRA unique among architecture and art publications is that it is completely editorially independent, so we as editors are able to operate a bit outside of the trend cycle and the PR machine. That doesn’t mean we don’t pay attention to those things—of course we do—but we usually come at them slant or with an eye toward what might be behind them. We’re really interested in questions and phenomena that are somewhat mundane—what is the architectural significance of a Wegman’s, for example, or what’s up with all these people hosting art galleries in their apartments. We’re also interested in the spaces and places that we see all the time—Little Island, the High Line, Hudson Yards, the Breuer building—to which we could use a totally fresh approach.
NYRA is also—and this was true before I joined—interested in questions of labor and collective organization, both in the architecture and design industries and in related areas like housing. We actually just did a round-up of pieces with that theme to celebrate the publication’s fifth birthday and International Workers’ Day.
NYRA in the wild at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Photo by Michael Piantini.
Let's backtrack a little — why architectural journalism for you? How did you come to both a career in writing, and to architecture?
I ended up in architecture sort of by accident; I was interested in a lot of different things as a teenager, which is hilariously when most of us have to decide on a career path, and a lot of adults in my life told me that architecture was a field where it was useful to be good at multiple things. So I started looking at architecture schools and ended up at the University of Tennessee; I needed significant financial aid, and they gave me a full scholarship that included housing and food. Once I got there, I kind of thought, “Hm, I’m interested in architecture as a subject, but I don’t really care about designing buildings.” I also remember the first day of the big survey class my first year, the professor who taught it said something like, “Only 20% of you will become practicing architects,” and already then I knew I’d be in the 80%.
By the end of my five-year B.Arch program, which was of course very focused on professional preparation for a career as an architectural designer, I felt like I hadn’t read enough. I also felt like there were things that I hadn’t been exposed to and didn’t know how to think about, so I decided to go to graduate school. I didn’t really have a plan; I just knew I wanted to be thinking and writing. Graduate school gave me the space to do that; I learned how to think there, which is the most important thing to know how to do if you want to be writing.
I had no idea what I would do for money once I graduated. I thought maybe I would teach, or get a job in an architecture firm that had a publications department, or get a job in a museum or… who knows. Ultimately I ended up turning down a job at a big architecture firm to work part-time with a friend of mine at her PR firm—she repped mostly architects—so that I could spend the rest of my time writing and doing political organizing. That job was great; my friend was a great boss, and everything I did there made me a better writer and sharper, more detailed thinker.
Tell me about how your career and your writing evolved. How did you become involved with NYRA?
When I first started getting my writing published regularly, around 2017, I was writing almost exclusively about architecture. Mostly I was responding to things that I read and that I was seeing people were saying. I wasn’t making any real money from it at this point; I think this is important to say for people who want to write as a career. I could write articles for $100 because I had a day job and my rent was $440. Slowly, I started getting more and different bylines and assignments that paid better. I learned how to negotiate fees. Eventually I started writing about culture more broadly, about books and movies in particular, but also about art. In 2020 I wrote an essay about Diego Maradona that made me feel like, okay, I can really do this—as in, I can actually write. I still really like that essay, actually, which is a rare thing.
In early 2021, I started a Substack that published every week; it was ostensibly about music, but I was also writing about my life; really, I was just trying to improve my writing and have a focused practice outside of the writing that I was doing for magazines or other outlets. I published there every week for more than a year, I think; now I publish less frequently, maybe every couple of months. It’s mostly an outlet for when I’m trying to work something out and feel I need the extra pressure of an audience in order to do so. I first became involved with NYRA later that year, in the spring; Samuel Medina, who is currently the editor, reached out to me about it, and I wrote something for an issue. I stayed in touch with the people involved; that fall, I did an event where Mark Foster Gage and I debated whether the book would kill the building. Nobody knows who won. And then the following spring I came on part-time as deputy editor.
“We’re really interested in questions and phenomena that are somewhat mundane—what is the architectural significance of a Wegman’s, for example, or what’s up with all these people hosting art galleries in their apartments.”
You’ve touched on a few already, but what would you say have been the biggest challenges throughout your career? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
I think the biggest challenge about being a writer is that after a certain point, you’ve read enough and you’ve thought enough that you have a sense of how good you could be, and also a sense of exactly how far off you are from reaching that. That, for me, is the continual challenge. A couple of years ago, for example, I had the sense that my focus on getting bylines and assignments had scattered my focus a bit, that I needed to think longer and deeper about certain topics that I was really interested in. So, I decided to do two things. The first was to pursue longer, and ideally better paid, pieces about topics that I really wanted to spend my time thinking about, and the second was to plan and execute an extensive reading and study plan. I wanted to get better at thinking; that was the goal. The hardest part, which I didn’t totally anticipate, was having fewer bylines, not necessarily because it meant I had less income, though that was also true, but primarily because the byline is this immediately gratifying thing. You feel like you’ve accomplished something; you get feedback; you get to see your name next to the title of the piece; you get to see your list of published pieces grow. I felt like I had lost a safety net. It took about a year and a half to complete the plan I had made for myself, and it really changed and deepened my entire approach to thinking and writing and getting published.
With NYRA, I think the biggest challenge has been just figuring out how to make a magazine of writing about architecture and cities that will appeal to non-experts. Architecture has long been presented as this rarefied subject that is inaccessible to most people; it’s even sometimes been hard to assign a piece to a writer who maybe has been working for years and years, writing about culture or art or books or film or whatever, but feels that they don’t have enough expertise in architecture to write about it. And then on the other side, it’s a question of how to make the magazine and the writing appealing to people who might not normally pick up a magazine about architecture. Part of it is in the topics we pick, the tone the writers take, and making sure it all connects to what’s actually going on in the city and in people’s lives within the city. Another part is also the way the publication looks, I think: the design, how it’s printed, the fonts, the illustrations. There’s no one answer, but we’re always figuring it out.
Marianela at NYRA Issue launch party. Photo by Angelina Torre.
NYRA issue launch party, photo by Angelina Torre.
What have you also learned in the last six months?
When NYRA first started, it was a really small outfit; I think most people involved were volunteers. When I was brought on in early 2022, it was part of an effort to make the print issues more sustainable and, in a word, serious. We changed the format from a pamphlet to a broadsheet, and we reduced the number of issues from ten a year to six, though the issues now are significantly longer, denser, and more varied in content.
The magazine has grown a lot, and that growth is starting to become more regular. Just in the last year or so, we’ve brought on four operations assistants; our former operations coordinator, Nicholas Raap, got promoted to associate publisher; and we hired a new managing editor, Chloe Wyma. That process of expansion has required learning how to create sustainable practices and set good precedents for how we work, so that we can continue to grow and bring people onto the team. That means standardizing our processes, making sure that everything is documented and easily accessible, and maintaining communication channels so that everyone is on the same page even as they’re working on different things.
Who are you admiring now and why?
I’m really admiring all the groups of students across the city and the country taking over their university campuses to demand divestment from Israel. I think the continued occupation of Palestine and the systematic wiping out of its people is wholly objectionable. It’s a genocide, and this latest escalation is atrocious. To be clear, I say that as an individual and not as a representative of NYRA.
As someone who thinks a lot about how space is used, it would be impossible not to admire the encampments, the way these students used space to make their demands clear. It would also be impossible not to notice the way that universities have been cracking down on these students. I listened to WKCR through the Columbia occupation, and not only did the university administration call the cops on the students, they also revoked studio access from WKCR staff. They couldn’t use their keycards to get into the space. The students had to figure out how to get into their studio and then have someone stay there overnight in order to be able to open the door to other people throughout the day; otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to cover one of the biggest, most important events in the recent history of the city. They are so on the right side of history. It’s amazing to watch.
“There is so much that lies outside of your control, and in my opinion no way to orchestrate a perfect career path or progression. You just have to set one foot in front of the other and make the next right decision.”
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
With NYRA, I think we’d really like to make architecture less rarefied and more a part of culture in general. Get people reading about buildings and cities and the physical and spatial aspects of their lives in the same way that they might read about film or art or books. We think it’s doable because we think people really do care about their built worlds.
When scaffolding goes up, or when you see those green signs around the city, or when there’s a skate park being built in your neighborhood, or when they’re tearing down a church on the corner to make an apartment building—people care! I think it’s just that they haven’t been given the tools to really think about it, and certainly they’re disenfranchised and disengaged from the processes that govern those events. Part of what we’re trying to do at NYRA is demystify not just those processes, give people a look behind the curtain, but also just show all the different ways forms thinking about a building, or a park, or a piece of infrastructure, can take.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
Life is long, and you never know what’s going to happen. There is so much that lies outside of your control, and in my opinion no way to orchestrate a perfect career path or progression. You just have to set one foot in front of the other and make the next right decision. If you want to be a writer, I would say make sure you have a way to make money. That probably applies to any creative field: it’s okay to do something just for money while you develop your craft. Maybe for women I’d add that you get to decide for yourself what types of things are worth your time and intelligence.