Page 206 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

206 ¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER
Not only that, but in Mies one can see, perhaps as with no other architect of the modern movement, a true case of schizophrenia between his “published” projects and those developed for his clients. Still in the 1920s, at the same time that he was developing his most radical designs, Mies could build such conservative houses as the Villa Eichstaedt in a suburb of Berlin (1921-23) and the villa Mosler in Potsdam (1924).
Can we blame these projects on the conservative taste of Mies’s clients? Mosler was a banker and his house is said to reflect his taste. But when in 1924 the art historian and constructivist artist, Walter Dexel, who was very much interested in and supportive of modern architecture, commissioned Mies to do a house for him, Mies blew it. He was unable to come up with the modern house his client had desired within the deadline. He gave one excuse after another. The deadline was repeatedly postponed. And in the end Dexel gave the project to another architect. For a long time, then, there was an enormous gap between the flowing architecture of Mies’s published projects and his struggle to find the appropriate techniques to produce these effects in built form. For many years he was literally trying to catch up with his publications. Perhaps that is why he worked so hard to perfect a sense of realism in the representation of his projects, as in the photomontage of the Glass Skyscraper with cars flying by on the Friedrichstrasse.
The utopian space of little magazines acted as the real building site for the production of a whole new Mies. In fact, the only Mies we know. His canonic steel, glass and marble assemblages were actually made possible by the most ephemeral serial publications. It was the repetition of his images and words in an expanded network of such magazines what gave an ever increasing sense of reality to highly experimental forms and to Mies himself.
The Radical Multiple
Even entire groups from De Stijl to Archigram became an effect of their journals. The critic Reyner Banham used to tell a story about a limousine full of Japanese architects that one day stopped in the street he used to live in London and asked directions for the office of Archigram. But Archigram didn’t exist as a group at the time. Archigram was just a little leaflet produced in the kitchen of Peter Cook who lived across the street from Reyner and