CONGRATS?

I’m a 40-year-old from the Swedish west coast with a taste for Italian renaissance art and country and western and quiet fireside evenings
reading Suecia Antiqua. I enjoy exploring cities and war monuments and my personal icon is probably Winston Churchill.
For the past few months I’ve been pondering those lonely-hearts adverts you see. Merely as a soul-searching exercise you understand (I’m happily married with a couple of kids). But when you’ve topped 40 you’ve got to face up to a few existential questions. What’s
become of you? And – if you’ve developed, as I have, into a hundredyear-old die-hard conservative – what’s to be done about it?
The magazine Forum is exactly ten years younger than I am. It was published first in 1976 and over the years it has developed from
a black and white trade leaflet for Swedish interior architects into a quarterly journal covering Nordic architecture, interior decoration
and design, published in Swedish and English and distributed worldwide. Latest figures show the magazine to be in top trim; Forum last
year was Sweden’s fifth most rapidly expanding journal.
In the issue you’re reading now we’ve continued our healthy selfanalysis. We’ve raised the tempo and packed the magazine with more articles and sections than before. One such new section is
The List, where we shall be regularly presenting the many “hidden heroes” in the world of architecture and design, people whose contributions are of major importance for the success of a project but who are seldom spotlighted in the media. On page 143 we list the
five leading visualisation companies in the Nordic region, companies whose competence is otherwise known only to those most involved.
Another recurring feature is what we in the office here refer to as the Forum project. What more can be done for architecture and design than merely writing about them? This question led us to clear the editorial offices during the recent Stockholm Furniture Fair and make room for an exhibition of the work of Johannes Norlander. In he came with his latest prototypes, a collection of office furniture produced in collaboration with Forum. The exhibition was the first in a series of planned projects in which Forum will be taking an active initiative in presenting ideas in consultation with designers and architects. You can read about Norlander and his collection on page 98.
But the most noticeable change in this issue is of course the new layout, a first step in the redesign of Forum. The graphic style is being developed in collaboration with Graphic Laundry, a design firm comprising some of the Nordic countries’ most distinctive and highly qualified art directors. We hope to present the final form in our next issue, 3/2006.
One final point before leaving the topic of the purifying plagues that should accompany major birthdays: if they are to take effect they
have to be 100 per cent honest; the most uncomfortable decisions bring the greatest rewards. For Forum, now celebrating its 30th birthday, there is in fact only one problem left to correct: the anonymous name.
The magazine is changing its name in the next issue.

MARK ISITT
Editor-in-chief

P.S. When I’m in really cheerful mood I play air guitar to the tune of The Who’s Young Man Blues.