With heavyweight collaborators such as Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Buckminster Fuller, Albert Kahn, Richard Neutra and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the architecture magazine "plus - orientations of contemporary architecture" was planned to be published six times a year in the Architectural Forum of Time Inc in New York. It was published in just 3 issues between December 1938 and May 1939 before being shut down. The magazine was edited by Wallace K. Harrison, William Lescaze, William Muschenheim, Stamo Papadaki and James Johnson Sweeney.

The remarkable layout was made by graphic designer Herbert Matter. Born in Switzerland, Matter studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and at the Académie Moderne in Paris with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. He worked with Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, Le Corbusier and Deberny & Peignot. In 1932, he returned to Zurich, where he designed posters for the Swiss National Tourist Office and Swiss resorts. The travel posters won instant international acclaim for his pioneering use of photomontage combined with typeface. He went to the United States in 1936 and was hired by legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. Work for Harper´s Bazaar, Vogue and other magazines followed. From 1946 to 1966 he was design consultant with Knoll Associates. He worked closely with Charles and Ray Eames. From 1952 to 1976 he was professor of photography at Yale University and from 1958 to 1968 he served as design consultant to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. As a filmmaker he directed a film on his friend Alexander Calder (with music by John Cage) for the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. Close friends of Matter and his wife Mercedes were the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, fellow Swiss photographer Robert Frank and Alberto Giacometti.