Alexander Dorner stated in the early twentieth century that we cannot understand the forces at work in the field of visual production today if we do not look at other spheres of modern life. We look at architecture as outsiders, but it has become everything: it has shaped the design of 032c magazine more profoundly than any influence from the history of graphic design. 032c is a bi-annual contemporary culture magazine with a focus on fashion, art and architecture from Berlin. Architecture has been present in the magazine from the first issue, featuring the Metabolists, the Japanese avant-garde architectural movement from the 60s, to the current issue, which includes emerging architects in Berlin to a profile of Japanese architects SANAA. What follow are images from the visual archive of the magazine corresponding to a sampling of editorials outlining the magazine’s aesthetic.
‘”Embrace Instability” localises moments of instability in different places and times: from a riot on the streets of Tokyo in 1969 to the beauty of snow crystals, this issue celebrates the unstable states where anything can happen…’
32c, 4th Issue, ‘Embrace Instability’, Winter 2002/2003
‘The paradox of our time: We are living in an absolutely exciting and demanding period, but aesthetic expression seems to be endlessly muted by nostalgic recycling of past forms. And this tendency is routinely celebrated rather than challenged. How to escape from this suffocating state propagated by dead-formulated content? One option might be, as we have endeavoured, to find the old in the new, and the new in the old; to collide the banal with the sophisticated, the mainstream with the obscure. An agenda powered by an ultra-violent clashing of opposites…’
032c, 9th Issue, ‘We Are Synchro-Time’, Summer 2005
‘Everywhere you look, it seems that contemporary designers have decided to settle for warmed over ruins of the past. This omnipresent retro-aesthetic is the most visible sign of a collective aesthetic and political paralysis. An entire generation has given up on its present and wallows in the forms of the past: in cars that pretend to have come from the 60s, in buildings that, with their empty window frames and sandstone mantles, imitate their forebears of the century before last. More than all others, designers are leaping like lemmings into the abyss of past securities and forms. Where does this drive to escape one’s own time come from? Part of the blame for this twiddling around the coordinates of the past can be laid at the feet of a cultural criticism that has declared the “modern” to be the devil of all eras. Meanwhile, the terms “modern” and “contemporary” have been so fundamentally mangled in postmodern and post-structuralist discourse that the era’s liberating fervour is all but forgotten: always create new forms for new needs with new materials; twist and turn thought itself until new perspectives are revealed; find new solutions for a better form of community. […] With the remix culture that sets the ironic idea of endless recombinations against the pathos of the absolutely new, the present has been banned to an endless loop of fakes and quotes from other lives. The generation that lives in this loop will leave behind nothing but copies of its predecessors. It will disappear like the proverbial face in the sand…’
032c, Niklas Maak, guest editor, 10th Issue, ‘True Zeitgenossenschaft’, Winter 2005/2006
‘WRONG. There is something incredibly powerful about making things wrong today. Perhaps it has become a cliché to praise the beauty of imperfections in a world that aspires to perfection. Flaws can be beautiful and break the mould, but what happens when what appears to be wrong becomes productive, even virile? This primal interest falls, appropriately, with our thirteenth issue, as 032c is becoming a teenager – what better time to indulge a promiscuous curiosity, to misstep, to be troublesome. We have created a content baroque that is about entering and breaking worlds. We live off the energy those clashes generate. In this issue Mark Wigley states this editorial modus operandi most eloquently: “Maybe we only ever learn something when some form we think of as foreign provokes us – and we resist. But sometimes, many times, in the middle of the resistance, we end up loving this thing that has provoked us”’.
032c, 13th Issue, ‘Energy Experimentation’, Summer 2007