Czarnecki moves from book publishing to magazine

One of the faces missing at CNU 19 next week in Madison, Wisconsin, will be that of John Czarnecki, senior acquisitions editor for architecture and design books at John Wiley & Sons. Czarnecki left Wiley this month to become editor in chief of Contract magazine, effective May 23. The magazine covers commercial design.

A Milwaukee native with master of architecture and master of urban planning degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Czarnecki published books by new urbanists such as Doug Farr, Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson, Dan Slone, Doris Goldstein, Stephen Coyle, Paul Crawford, and Daniel and Karen Parolek.

Retrofitting Suburbia by Dunham-Jones and Williamson won the Architecture & Urban Planning category of the 2009 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (the PROSE Awards).

Czarnecki was with the Hoboken, New Jersey-based publisher for eight years, and left while other new urbanist books were still in development. A Wiley book by Robert Gibbs on retail planning is scheduled for release this fall. Victor Dover and John Massengale are co-authoring a book on streets, which is more than a year from release.

Prior to joining Wiley, Czarnecki was an associate editor at Architectural Record. Earlier, he practiced architecture with firms in Milwaukee and Madison and was an urban designer with the firm Urban Strategies in Toronto.