William Menking, who founded The Architect’s Newspaper (A/N) with his wife, Diana Darling, in 2003, died at age 72 on April 11, 2020, after a long battle with lymphoma. As editor-in-chief of A/N, he wrote hundreds of editorials over the past 17 years, many reflecting his deeply held views about how architects could make the world a better place. “Bill believed that architects are really well-meaning, and he inspired people to step up,” said Sharon Prince, CEO of the Grace Farms Foundation, who worked with Menking on a program to eliminate forced labor in the production of building materials.
Menking was an indispensable part of the architecture world long before he and Darling launched the newspaper, the only one of its kind in the U.S. He was an author and curator with a particular interest in the radical architecture movements of the 1960s and 70s. Barry Bergdoll, professor at Columbia University and former chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, described Menking’s 1998 New York show about Archigram as an “amazing spectacle of huge drawings, wall-to-wall and almost floor-to-ceiling, at a moment when interest in the radical architecture of the ‘60s was not in full swing as it is today. In this and in so many things,” Bergdoll told RECORD, “Bill was ahead of the curve.”
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