Connection has been organized "to cut across barriers within the field of the visual arts, and to find out if the graduate student is, in fact, alive." It succeeds less in transcending barriers than in recognizing that they exist and that they should be transcended.

The magazine itself leans heavily toward architecture and city planning, containing only one article on the Fine Arts, but it does not suffer from the academic narrowness it criticizes. Actually, it over-reacts against that narrowness. The authors tend toward a pretentiously cosmic viewpoint.

One finds it necessary to extend the art historian's reluctance to face "the real issues" to our whole society. This is typical. A problem that arises in relation to the visual arts, or just to one of them, is applied to the world at large. The cutlook becomes so broad that one loses sight of the subject at hand.

The articles make some good points, but these points are usually obvious. The central theme is that the architect and planner must be modern Renaissance men in whom specialized training has not killed creativity and humanistic values.

In "A New Recipe for Cold Roast Boston," Gordon Milde goes into unnecessary speculation about the future of our technological society, but he also makes the valid point that a neighborhood (particularly a lower-class neighborhood) is a web of vital human relationships which are destroyed whenever the neighborhood is. The planner should realize, therefore, that new highways and urban renewal disrupt the lives of hundreds of people; he should not rearrange cities for purely aesthetic or commercial reasons. Unfortunately, it is sometimes hard to distinguish Milde's ideas from these of Professor Banfield, whom he quotes at the beginning.

The editors add to the confusion. With no visible transition the introductory editorial discusses first the specialization that attends study in a given field and then that which divides intellectual and intuitive approaches to the field.

The editorial describes how, in contrast to the prevailing specialization, "T. S. Eliot exemplifies the value of a syncretic approach. He merges two disciplines, criticism and poetry, enriching the one with the other, never allowing the ascendancy of either." Is the combination of poetry and criticism so unusual? Does Eliot exemplify a value? Is the first sentence appropriate to a magazine that claims elsewhere that "the Harvard academic...says what no one else would ever bother to say in thicker language than anyone else has yet been able to say it"?

In general, the editors seem aware only of those few faults of academicism that they directly discuss. Certainly, they have not eliminated the loose, repetitious writing so prevalent in universities or the pretentious phrases incorrectly used. Nor do they reject the pedant's tone of self-conscious enlightment.

The tone tends to be annoying rather than actually offensive. It does, however, become incredibly pompous in Siegfried Giedion's article on "Continuity and Change in the Vocation of the Architect" when Giedion quotes himself three times.

Even in Giedion's article, tone is not the main problem. Connection has a laudable aim, but it needs more informative writing and much tighter editing.