Page 204 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

204 ¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER
exist without G, the journal that he was part of, and the many little magazines to which he contributed, from Frühlicht to Merz.
These magazines didn’t report on the world. They incubated whole new worlds, offering glimpses of societies living under completely different physical, social and intellectual rules. Each little magazine is a portable utopia, a space unrestrained by conventional logic. It perforates the real world with alternative visions, a puncturing of the real whose effect is multiplied by the repetition of each printed copy, the regular rhythm of serial production, and the viral spreading of images shared between magazines. Free of the constraints of gravity, finance, social convention, technical assumptions, hierarchies, and responsibilities, the ever widening network of little magazine incubates a new architecture. The portable utopia becomes a real construction site.
The portable utopia it is not just a container of dreams. The little magazine is itself an artwork, an architecture crafted with all the precision given to any design object. It is a multiple produced by a collaborative team of artists/architects. Magazines are all about repetition. They hit again and again. And they keep moving. Like a boxer. This relentless logic of the multiple infects the projects being promoted. Modern architecture literally takes form in the world as a multiple. The design that appears a thousand times in the issue of a magazine ends up being reproduced globally. Experimental multiples by artists-architects become mass produced norms.
The Architect as Artwork
Mies is a classic example. His place in architectural history, his role as one of the leaders of the modern movement, was established through a series of 5 projects (none of them actually built, or even buildable—they were not developed at that level), he produced for competitions and publications during the first half of the 1920s: the Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper of 1921, the Glass Skyscraper of 1922, the Reinforced Concrete Office Building of 1923, and the Concrete and Brick Country Houses of 1923 and 1924. These projects were inseparable from the magazines in which they appeared. The layout of the buildings and the layout of the pages are interwoven.