ARKISNAK is a quarterly, risograph-printed newspaper that offers bite-sized architectural musings and celebrates architects, artists, and makers of California's East Bay Area. Each issue captures the seasonality of California’s East Bay Area through opinion pieces, essays, reviews, reported work, academic articles, poetry, illustrations and more, created by and for our local arts and architecture community. Our editors work with writers to develop their pieces, with rates ranging from $50 to $150. ARKISNAK circulates free of charge amongst architecture and art spaces in our salty Bay Area, targeting students, professionals, and an architecturally-curious public.

We are titled after the 1968 student installation at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED). In protest of the top-down modernist vision of planning and its failure to include minority and other community voices, students created a "vending machine" on the eastern facade of Bauer Wurster Hall, placing colorful cardboard representations of social concerns outside the architecture building's windows. Arkisnak pays homage to this event and CED’s legacy of student-led commentary on the state of architectural education.

The publication is led by graduate students Isabelle de Metz + Al Oliva who met at CED during their graduate studies. We are funded by The Graham Foundation and supported by UC Berkeley’s Department of Architecture.

Drop us a line @arkisnak or at arkisnak@gmail.com.

“Arkisnak,” Environmental Design Archives Exhibitions, accessed August 28, 2023, https://exhibits.ced.berkeley.edu/items/show/298.