After 25 years of running this blog under various names — all of which can be lumped under the “Archidose” monicker — I’ve decided to shut it down, moving this hobby, this labor of love, to Substack, which I have used since mid-2021 and where I will continue to send out weekly newsletters focused on architecture books, but in a new format. (You can subscribe to my newsletter here or on Substack.) So, this isn’t “goodbye” as much as it is “see you in your inbox.”
| Grayer and hopefully wiser: me, John Hill, from the mid-1990s until today |
Besides thinking something along the lines of, Wait! 25 years?, you also may be wondering, Why stop now? The now, January 2024, is because I happen to like fives, it turns out — so much so that every significant thing related to this blog has occurred in five five-year intervals (this is by chance, not by design, I swear):
- 1999: Started A Weekly Dose of Architecture (with a post about the Kimbell Art Museum)
- 2004: Started A Daily Dose of Architecture (with a post about the World Trade Center Memorial Design Competition)
- 2009: Started working with World-Architects and got my first book deal (I was out of work at the time, so the writing that I began doing as a hobby in 1999 turned into my primary focus as of 2009)
- 2014: Stopped A Weekly Dose of Architecture (complete with five bullet points on why)
- 2019: Started A Daily Dose of Architecture Books (five more bullet points!)
- 2024: Stopped Archidose
In terms of the why, I’ve thought of that question a little bit, and outside of it just feeling like it’s the right time, here are a handful (again!) of reasons:
- Very few people read blogs anymore (true, that was also the case 10 years ago, but I kept at it until now, as I liked doing it)
- More people subscribe, open, and read my Substack newsletter than those who click on the links to this blog or find their way here in some other manner to read my posts (the logical step, therefore, is to put everything in the newsletter…but not behind a paywall, mind you)
- Blogger is outdated, with infrequent updates; its themes/templates are buggy; adding content is frustrating (this list could go on near endlessly)
- Substack’s formatting is much easier and more elegant than Blogger (see next bullet point, too)
- This blog takes up too much of my time, time I’d rather spend on other things (the new newsletter will be easier to produce than this blog, but hopefully it will be helpful and therefore worth people’s time in opening it and reading it)
But stopping this blog also makes me wonder what it amounted to, if anything. Is there enough good content on this blog to put some of it on paper, to make it a more permanent thing? Or is the content simply of its time and therefore best to leave here in the digital ether? I don’t know, to be honest, and when I dig back through some of the posts I veer from thinking the things I wrote were really good to thinking they were garbage … okay, not quite garbage, but not special enough for a bound volume tucked away in a library somewhere. The truth is somewhere between these poles, I reckon, so hopefully I’ll come up with a way to make sense of this side project, this 25-year undertaking, and turn what I did into something else even more rewarding.