Page 203 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

LITTLE MAGAzINES: PORTABLE UTOPIA BEATRIz COLOMINA
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Little magazines are a small utopia, a mass produced portable universe. Architects use little magazines as a space in which the images of projects in the multiple copies dispersed around the world are more important than any one project constructed in the streets. Even the designed space of those pages is itself a key collaborative project that circulates.
The history of the avant-garde in art, in architecture, in literature can’t be separated from the history of its engagement with the media. And it is not just because the avant-garde used media to publicize their work. The work simply didn’t exist before its publication.
Futurism didn’t really exist before the publication of the Futurist manifesto in Le Figaro in 1909. Adolf Loos didn’t exist before his polemic writings in the pages of newspapers and in his own little magazine Das Andere (1903). Le Corbusier didn’t exist before his magazine L’Esprit Nouveau (1920-25) and the books that came out of its polemical pages pages (Vers une architecture, Urbanisme, L’art decoratif d’aujourd’hui, Almanach)1. He became known as an architect and created a clientele for his practice through these pages. The very name Le Corbusier was a pseudonym used for writing about architecture in L’Esprit Nouveau. In that sense, one can argue that Le Corbusier was an effect of a little magazine. Even an architect like Mies van der Rohe, who is primarily thought in terms of craft and tectonics, didn’t really
1 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, Crès y Cie, 1923. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, Crès y Cie, 1925. Le Corbusier, L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui, Crès y Cie, Paris, 1925. Le Corbusier, Almanach d’architecture moderne, Crès y Cie, Paris, 1925.