Everything solid vanishes in the air

The complex paradox that unites utopia and reality, innovation and capitalism, is dealt with under the heading All that is solid vanishes into thin air (Todo lo sólido se desvanece en el aire). The starting point is a famous quote by Karl Marx. A thought that political scientist and urbanist Marshall Berman envisioned as the possibility of understanding 'the modern' as a consequence of a certain conception of life encouraged by capitalism, in which 'innovation' encourages the expansion of human desires beyond limits. Berman traced some of the humanist and spiritual sources of modernity - Baudelaire, Le Corbusier, Goethe - to show that progress forces us to assume mutations and abolish the limits of canon, geography or morality. Sofia Jack visits places that incarnated modern rationality to investigate its reverse side, and how the human factor - desires, fears and affections - cracks an idea of reason and order that becomes utopia.

Certainly, it may seem paradoxical to recognise a Karl Marx admiring capitalist innovation. But it is not. The incessant and insatiable need for growth encourages the expansion of human desires beyond the established. In some of the drawings in this series, we find emblematic places of the architectural avant-garde of the last century; spaces of rationalist architecture in which he develops a psychological, emotional and affective fact, as a mirror of a personal and non-transferable life story. Others represent intimate spaces in which life develops as a reflection of the psyche of its inhabitant, or objects capable of adapting to the needs of the inhabitant and his or her environment. In all of them, we will recognise the inhabited space as a sign of transformation and change.