Founded in Berlin in 1923 by the filmmaker Hans Richter, G (short for "Material zur Elementaren Gestaltung", Material for Elemental Form-Creation) gathered an extraordinary cross-section of the European avant-garde into a single, short-lived publication.
Across its small handful of issues, G published work by Hans Arp, Walter Benjamin, Theo van Doesburg, Viking Eggeling, Naum Gabo, Werner Graeff, George Grosz, Hugo Häring, Raoul Hausmann, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Frederick Kiesler, El Lissitzky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Antoine Pevsner, Man Ray, and Tristan Tzara. The journal's design was a collaboration between Lissitzky, Richter, and Graeff themselves.
Though it ran for only six issues across three years, G is now considered a pivotal document of the early-1920s Berlin avant-garde, sitting at the intersection of Constructivism, De Stijl, and the emerging Neue Sachlichkeit.
G published six issues in total. This archive currently holds readable PDFs for issue 1 (July 1923) and issue 3 (June 1924); covers only are available for issue 4 (March 1926) and the combined issue 5–6.
5 buildings and projects have been extracted from the issues; a selection is listed here, each opening the issue at its page. See all 5 projects in the project directory.
Filmmaker and a pioneer of abstract animated film; founded and edited the journal throughout its run.
Co-designed the journal's typography and layout alongside Richter and Graeff.
Co-designed the journal's typography and layout alongside Richter and Lissitzky.
Scans held in this archive were digitised, paginated, OCR-processed, and assembled into PDF booklets by the Architectural Periodicals Database team.
Copyright status has not yet been fully researched for this title. Under EU law (Directive 2006/116/EC), protection for a named author's work lasts 70 years after that author's death. Hans Richter died in 1976, meaning his individually authored contributions remain in copyright in the EU until 2046. The Architectural Periodicals Database does not assert ownership of the original creative content, only of the database itself. If you are a rights holder and believe your work has been used without appropriate permission, please contact us at info@architecturalperiodicals.com.