Jack Self is a registered architect with master's degrees in economics and philosophy. He curated the 2016 British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. He has interviewed Carlo Rovelli, Chelsea Manning, and Pope Francis. He owns the trademarked phrase "Form Follows Finance." He once dressed up for Fantastic Man. He is one of the world's leading experts on postcapitalism. And in 2016, he made a magazine.
Real Review launched with a Kickstarter campaign and a tagline so perfectly calibrated it could serve as a philosophical mission statement: "What it means to live today." The magazine is nominally about architecture, but only in the way that architecture is nominally about buildings. In practice, Real Review is about the gig economy, mass surveillance, caffeine as a capitalist drug, round dinner tables destroying patriarchy by removing the head of the household, the impact of Uber's algorithm on how we use cities, and Kim Jong-Il's monuments in North Korea. It examines the unseen systems and structures that shape contemporary life, using spatial practice as a lens through which everything else comes into focus.
The design, by London studio OK-RM, is unlike anything else on the newsstand. The magazine uses a vertical fold as a structural element — the first publication to do so — creating a three-dimensional page that constantly shifts the relationship between image and text. The format is tall and narrow, roughly 115 by 260 millimeters, and the effect is of holding something between a newspaper and a manifesto. Each issue runs to about eighty-eight pages, features a signature Nishant Choksi cover illustration, and contains articles aimed at readers ranging from those with no knowledge of architecture to those who have been practising for decades.
To Self's great surprise, about a third of the readership comes from the fashion world. A quarter are architects. The rest are predominantly designers of other kinds. The magazine is published by REAL Foundation, Self's cultural institute, and it operates on the fringes of art, design, fashion, architecture, economics, and politics without belonging entirely to any of them. Now seventeen issues deep and perennially popular at independent magazine shops, Real Review has proven that the format of the review — that most underappreciated form of criticism — is capable of encompassing an entire epoch.
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