Summer 2024
From the Norwegian seaside to the Ethiopian highlands; from the Bavarian Forest to the Taiwanese coast; from Venice to the Las Vegas Venetian, Log 61 travels in pursuit of architecture. In this open summer issue, Christopher Pierce visits cabins designed by Kastler Skjeseth Architects, and Motuma Tulu drives across southern Ethiopia to document informal architecture; Tim Altenhof rides along with architect Peter Haimerl to see his unique housing and restoration work while Thomas Daniell wrestles with the appendages of RUR Architecture’s Kaohsiung Port Terminal; and in Venice, Lina Malfona contemplates Tadao Ando’s exhibition design for painter Zeng Fanzhi, and behind the Venetian, Cameron Wu assess the geometric problems of Populous’s Sphere. Jimenez Lai checks out the architectural follies at Coachella, and Ben Fehrman-Lee sees the Frederick Kiesler exhibition in New York.
Log 61 also includes the (more) speculative travels of the theoretical mind, with Iman Ansari advocating a program of action, Kristine Chung investigating parasitic cell towers, and Andrew Witt digging into the avant-garde proposals of Doug Michels and Ant Farm. The issue features 10 short observations, which range from book and exhibition reviews to 5G infrastructure and the ever-changing streetscape. It concludes with a trio of ending: Todd Gannon marks the end of an era with the passing of José Oubrerie, André Patrão questions what it means to speak of the “end” of architecture, and Justin Beal imagines an architecture that forestalls the “end of the world.”
Winter/Spring 2024
“The architecture we inhabit, the urban systems we rely on, and the landscapes we transform are all part of the technosphere,” write Albert Pope and Brittany Utting, guest editors of Log 60: The Sixth Sphere. For them, the sixth sphere is the technosphere, an emergent man-made system entangled with the Earth’s five natural spheres: the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, and lithosphere. “Taken as a whole, the technosphere includes our feedlots and sewer systems, factories and housing, tarmacs and croplands, and every modification we have made to the ground, the glaciers, the sea, the air, and the biosphere. It is a vast and often banal landscape. . . . Almost everything we do – prepare a meal, buy a shirt, message a colleague, fill a prescription, take a bath – we do through the technosphere.”
Log 60, a 208-page thematic issue, explores the technosphere as “a planetary enmeshment of bodies, environments, and technologies” by examining the Earth’s natural spheres through the lenses of architecture, science, and philosophy. Geologist Peter K. Haff defines the technosphere; architect Rafael Beneytez-Duran, philosopher Emanuele Coccia, and historian Ingrid Halland each consider how we occupy and breathe the atmosphere; architects Alexandra Arènes, Daniel Jacobs, Brittany Utting, Lydia Kallipoliti, Andreas Theodoridis, and Neyran Turan take on the scope of the biosphere; architects Margarita Jover, Marina Tabassum, and Maggie Tsang wade through the history and challenges of the hydrosphere; anthropologist Dominic Boyer, landscape architect Leena Cho, and architects Billy Fleming, Joyce Hsiang, and Bimal Mendis take stock of the possible futures of the cryosphere; and climate researcher Holly Jean Buck, architects Rania Ghosn, Ang Li, and Marina Otero Verzier each dig into the possibilities in the lithosphere. As the guest editors write: “Log 60 positions the technosphere not only as a geophysical condition to understand and critique but also as a collective site in which to construct alternative social, technical, and environmental futures.”
Fall 2023
To mark Log’s 20 years of observing architecture and the contemporary city, former guest editors and current editorial protagonists were invited to interview someone whose work resonates with their current thinking or concerns, or even with what keeps them up at night. The conversations they initiated range from designing with AI to AI’s possible future consciousness; from natural French wine to Indigenous Mexican textiles; from building architecture to theorizing architecture; from corruption in the building industry to untold histories. Literary critic Caroline Levine calls for activism; urbanist Milton S.F. Curry says it’s a time for manifestos; and artist Ursula Biemann brings our relationship to a changing Earth System into sharper view.
The ideas and opinions of the 55 voices in Log 59 both push against and coincide with each other. But they all testify to the changes in architecture and culture since Log was launched in September 2003.
Summer 2023
From building renovations to drawing trees and planting forests; AI and air flow; exhibitions of architecture and architecture for exhibitions, Log 58 brings together articles by 18 authors, both new and established. In this 160-page open issue, Emmett Zeifman codifies “Five Points” in the work of Lacaton & Vassal and Lisa Hsieh finds kawaii qualities in Hideyuki Nakayama’s designs. Harish Krishnamoorthy explores two politicized Hong Kong museums while Cynthia Davidson studies Studio Gang’s addition to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Mario Carpo considers the generative capacity of precedents in AI; Ian Erickson, the form-finding potential of a digital breeze; and Phillip Denny, the details of a drawing by Michelle JaJa Chang. Shiila Infriccioli recounts the aftermath of a storm in Italy, Waiko Waida storyboards an early modern movement in Japan, and Norihisa Kawashima renovates an office building.
Then there are the exhibitions: Donald Bates, Courtney Coffman, and Thomas Daniell each assess the good, the bad, and the socializing at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale. Christian Nakarado reviews “Confronting Carbon Form” at The Cooper Union in New York, and Patrick Templeton visits “Transformación urbana: Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos” in Mexico City.
Log 58 also pays tribute to three important, recently lost voices, two of them with new translations: Arata Isozaki on Metabolism, and Bruno Latour on modernism; as well as Craig Hodgetts’s remembrance of Los Angeles visionary architect Robert Mangurian.
Winter/Spring 2023
“Calls for more Blackness in architecture schools can be simplistic,” writes architect Darell Wayne Fields, guest editor of Log 57. Well-meaning equity and inclusion programs often simply “associate the mere presence of Black bodies with institutional change.” In Log 57, a 208-page thematic issue titled Black is . . . an’ Black ain’t . . ., 29 authors explore the complexities of Blackness as it relates to aesthetics and architectural pedagogy. As Fields notes, “In calling for more Blackness, I, for one, am calling for more Black methodology. An inherent characteristic of [which] is a measurement of difference.”
To that end, Log 57 gathers essays and reflections on architectural pedagogies, both in academia and in practice, by Sean Canty, Michelle JaJa Chang, Ajay Manthripragada, and Mónica Ponce de León, among others. Projects by young designers for whom methodological concepts of Black Signification and bricolage are central are presented in a four-color section, and built works and a preservation effort channel difference as a generative force in real-world communities. “This work demonstrates what is possible when methodological change is real,” writes Fields. “Real change, like Blackness, makes us nervous. Black difference, however, is revolutionary.”
Fall 2022
This special issue is the cataLog for “Model Behavior,” a group exhibition of models, architectural and otherwise, curated by the Anyone Corporation and presented by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, in New York City. The exhibition, which ran October 4–November 18, 2022, questioned the role of the model in projecting or eliciting social behavior. In addition to documenting the 55 exhibited works with four-color images and project descriptions, the 160-page cataLog includes essays by curator Cynthia Davidson; by architecture theorists Jörg H. Gleiter, Kiel Moe, and Christophe Van Gerrewey; and by art historian Annabel Jane Wharton.
Summer 2022
From a bridge to blockchain, Amazonian urbanism to artificial intelligence, Log 55 recognizes the vast concerns of architecture today. This 176-page open issue, which includes a 16-page color insert, compiles essays, building and exhibition reviews, and remarks by 25 architects, theorists, and artists from around the world. In Berlin, Tim Altenhof critiques the newly rebuilt Humboldt Forum; in Los Angeles, Victor J. Jones reviews Michael Maltzan’s Ribbon of Light Viaduct; in New York, Cynthia Davidson visits the late Virgil Abloh’s “social sculpture,” and Thomas de Monchaux views “Anthony Ames Fifty Paintings”; in Quito, Ana María Durán Calisto and Sanford Kwinter draw inspiration from Indigenous territorial intelligence; in Rotterdam, Christophe Van Gerrewey reflects on MVRDV’s Boijmans Depot; in Taipei, Kwang-Yu King compares two new cultural venues by OMA and RUR; and in Tokyo, Jan Vranoský pens a postmortem for Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower. Matthew Allen looks to computer science for a way out of the theory-practice divide; Simone Brott considers the ways NFTs will change architectural practice; Karel Klein draws parallels between memory and AI; and Marija Marič warns against digitized real estate fractions.
In addition, a special section guest edited by Francesco Marullo is devoted to Notes on the Desert. The section, which raises issues of climate change and the extraction economy, includes essays by architect Nathan Friedman on the US-Mexico border, artist Kim Stringfellow on jackrabbit homesteads, feminist scholar Traci Brynne Voyles on the 49ers, and architect Lydia Xynogala speaking for a desert toad; photo essays by the Center for Land Use Interpretation on nuclear tombs and by photographer Susan Lipper on desert utopia; as well as an interview with photographer Richard Misrach on his Cantos series.
Winter/Spring 2022
Log 54: Coauthoring gathers essays by and conversations with architects, curators, historians, and collectives that, as guest editors Ana Miljački and Ann Lui write, begin to “imagine the field of architecture orienting around coauthoring instead of authoring” and “challenge the model of architectural authorship that dominates both architectural discourse and the market.” In so doing, the contributors to this 176-page thematic issue “enter the space of political and identity negotiations to relinquish absolutes and to open up to multiple forms of agency.” These forms of agency manifest in numerous ways, from the Fluxus Manifesto to the words of an Enlightenment painter, from bats to spider webs, from cartography to geological deep time, from AI-generated toys to PowerPoint and Miro boards.
Miljački and Lui talk with Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers from Dream the Combine; J. Yolande Daniels and Amanda Williams from the Black Reconstruction Collective; architect and curator Andrés Jaque, and 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial curator David Brown about their collaborative practices. Sumayya Vally and Moad Musbahi transcribe site-specific music, while Curtis Roth uses gig workers’ gestures to create paintings. The Architecture Lobby and Dark Matter University discuss the implications of coauthorship through their cowritten dialogues; Timothy Hyde and Lisa Haber-Thomson study Welsh building codes; Sarah Hirschman looks at US copyright law; and De Peter Yi and Laura Marie Peterson document how residents use the Detroit Land Bank. Historians Anna Bokov, S.E. Eisterer, and Michael Kubo recount coauthorship in Soviet education, resistance in gestapo prisons, and today’s anonymous architectural megacorporation.
Fall 2021
Log 53 asks the simple yet provocative question “Why Italy Now?” The responses are as diverse and multifaceted as the country itself. Exploring this seemingly well-trodden ground, one discovers that because of its historic centrality – and its precarity – Italy remains relevant to the challenges facing architecture today. As contributor Giulia Amoresano writes: “Amid calls today to challenge the Eurocentrism of canonical histories of architecture’s modernity and to work on decolonizing its theories and practices, work needs to be done on what we think canonical spaces are.”
Log 53 is guest edited by Alicia Imperiale in New York and Manuel Orazi in Macerata. Essays include philosopher Giorgio Agamben on a Venetian door, theorist Mario Carpo on blight in Piedmont, architect ElDante’ Winston on violence in Bologna, historian Edward Eigen on the Club of Rome, architect Fabrizio Furiassi on the Mafia in Sicily, and reporter Mario Calvo-Platero on colonial architecture in Tripoli. Emilia Giorgi explores unplanned greenery in Rome, while Gabriele Mastrigli highlights the planned greenery of EUR. Iwan Strauven reviews books on Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi, Britt Eversole parses the trove of untranslated Italian theory, and Ingrid D. Rowland details her translation of Vitruvius. Paulette Singley sets the place for Italian cuisine, and Giulia Amoresano sources caffè espresso in the colonization of southern Italy. An Tairan revisits an 18th-century earthquake, Daniele Profeta analyzes the impact of the 19th-century Grand Tour, and Davide Spina exposes the dark side of postwar architecture culture. Greg Lynn talks with art historian Marilyn Aronberg Lavin about her digital analysis of Piero della Francesca, and Patrick Templeton asks writer and podcaster Alex Hochuli about Italy’s political legacy. Log 53 also presents projects by women building in Italy today – Lina Malfona, Elisabetta Terragni, and Maria Alessandra Segantini – as well as in the past – overlooked Neapolitan modernist Stefania Filo Speziale.
Summer 2021
Through essays, conversations, and reviews, the architects, artists, journalists, and theorists gathered in Log 52 interrogate architecture’s role in a world of social, virological, environmental, and paradigmatic change. As David Adjaye says in a conversation with curator Thelma Golden and artist Rick Lowe about Black social practice, the work to be done today “is a planetary project that’s about understanding a world filled with a multitude of peoples and perspectives.”
The multiple perspectives in Log 52 include: Vickii Howell, Joycelyn Davis, Darron Patterson, and Joe Womack on the past, present, and future of Africatown in Mobile, Alabama; Deborah Gans on diverse and resilient communities in New Orleans; and Charles L. Davis II on the exhibition “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.” Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz remember the late Michael Sorkin and his prescient warnings about the neoliberal city; Matthew Soules looks at housing as a financial asset of global capitalism; and Patrick Templeton evaluates Thomas Heatherwick’s spectacle urbanism. In a series of book and exhibition reviews, Kurt W. Forster travels from the Gothic to the digital in Lars Spuybroek’s Grace and Gravity; Kyle Miller finds unlikely resonances among architects in David Erdman’s Introducing; Thomas de Monchaux follows constructive lines in Studio Ames’s “Linee Occulte”; and Whitney Moon sees double in BlairBalliet’s “No More Room.” In addition, Cynthia Davidson interviews Emilio Ambasz, often called the father of green architecture, and Lindy Roy and Leah Kelly study our nervous system’s mapping capacities.
Log 52 concludes with Cosmodality, the third guest-edited nature section, which features essays by Sanford Kwinter on VR, Ed Keller on cosmopolitics, and a discussion between guest editor Gökhan Kodalak and philosopher Elizabeth Grosz.
Winter/Spring 2021
From New Delhi to Nanjing, Tohoku to Tulsa, Maputo to Mito, Log 51 (Winter/Spring 2021) gathers essays and observations from architects, historians, designers, and curators around the world on topics that range from the potential of images and architectural representation to the power of art and politics. In this open issue, Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley reimagine the early work of Bruce Goff, Christophe Van Gerrewey assesses Jan De Vylder’s sketches and Excel drawings, and Thomas Daniell explores Sei’ichi Shirai’s unbuilt atomic memorial. Dijia Chen follows how a single photograph shaped the career of Zhang Lei, and Ruo Jia defines post-Maoist architecture in China. Max Kuo maps postdigital/postinternet architecture, Iman Fayyad sees flatness as a productive framework, and Kyle Miller unpacks a deadpan tonality. In addition, Harish Krishnamoorthy questions India’s new government district, while Courtney Richeson digs into the alt-right foundations of the 2020 US Federal Civic Architecture mandate. Véronique Patteeuw and Clara Leverd visit a collector’s London flat, Tatiana Knoroz discovers ingenuity in Japanese danchi, and much more. . . .
One-quarter of the 200-page issue is devoted to Excursions in the Ecosphere, the sequel to The Return of Nature in Log 49. In this special section guest edited by Sanford Kwinter, Aleksandra Jaeschke synthesizes systems theory, greenhouse architecture, and banyan trees, Gökhan Kodalak plays with lines of forces in a David Foster Wallace memoir, and Kwinter and Bruce Mau discuss shifting paradigms of design.
Fall 2020
From the economic to the political, from public health to the climate, models seem to run the world. In architecture, the model is no longer just a physical tool for conceptualizing or representing architects’ visions but must also encompass digital and 3D-printed models, data and artificial intelligence models, business models, educational models, and even engage the discipline’s own questionable history in establishing role models. A thematic issue, Log 50: Model Behavior interrogates models in this expanded sense: what are their values, their behaviors, and the behaviors they elicit. In a record-setting 256 pages, 39 authors, ranging from established architectural thinkers to up-and-coming practitioners, examine the role of the model in architecture today through critical essays, conversations, observations, projects, and provocations.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Summer 2020
As the world reckons with the compounding crises of a pandemic, racial unrest, a recession, and climate change, Log 49 compiles essays, interviews, observations, and manifestos by 29 authors in an effort to make sense of architecture, the city, and nature in the midst of turmoil. This 196-page issue includes a special section, The Return of Nature, guest edited by architectural philosophers Gökhan Kodalak and Sanford Kwinter, who write in their introduction, “The world is on fire, and we are the fire. . . . The time has come for a reboot.” They, along with philosophers Muriel Combes and Erin Manning and architects Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Trummer, offer concepts and methods toward that reboot.
Aspects of nature permeate the entire issue. Historian Sylvia Lavin explores architects’ depictions and use of trees in four essays seeded throughout the issue and philosopher Jacques Rancière discusses the aesthetic regime of 18th-century landscape, while architect Sasa Zivkovic unravels the structural potential of unusable trees and Erin and Ian Besler produce an interactive pop-up postcard for practicing tree pruning. Architects Neeraj Bhatia and Emmett Zeifman each rethink the idea of collective form, Elena Manferdini and Christina Griggs see new possibilities in color, and Luke Studebaker digs deep into the AMO/Rem Koolhaas exhibition “Countryside, The Future.” In response to the COVID-19 quarantine, philosopher Emanuele Coccia calls for a domestic revolution, Henryetta Duerschlag learns to teach photography via Zoom, and architecture students observe New York City in lockdown from their windows. And in a recollection that is broadly relevant today, when the ground seems to be shifting beneath our feet, historian Nakatani Norihito recounts how when viewing the devastation wrought by the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, he realized that “without land, architecture and architecture history are meaningless.”
Winter/Spring 2020
“The center of architecture is shifting and cannot hold,” writes guest editor Bryony Roberts in Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice. This moment of change, in which issues of inequity and intersectionality are coming to the fore, represents “an invitation to think differently, a chance to reask the questions that haunted the 20th century.”
The collected authors in this issue range from architects and urbanists to curators and composers who grapple with what it means to practice in a more just way, balancing aesthetics with ethics. As Roberts writes, “What emerges from [these] experiments with situated, intersectional practice is the merging of the professional and the personal. Rather than neutrality, practices cultivate empathy.” At the heart of this issue are Roberts’s interviews with progressive practices Assemble, Borderless Studio, HECTOR, LA-Más, and Mabel O. Wilson. In addition, essayists Peggy Deamer and Michael Kubo discuss collaborative architecture practices today and in the past; Ann Lui advocates for an Office of the Public Architect; Jane Rendell and Margo Handwerker define what it means for work to be situated and specific; Ana Miljački and Jerome Haferd propose better pedagogies; and Jia Yi Gu, Deborah Garcia, and the feminist architecture collaborative position feminist theory in architectural practice and discourse today. Also in this issue, Katy Barkan and Ashley Fure contextualize their installation works; Jess Myers expands the idea of kinship; Mira Henry and John Cooper discuss a “not-famous” building in Los Angeles; and Cynthia Davidson talks with Mirko Zardini about the role of the museum today.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Fall 2019
“Until now, most environmental discourse in architecture has focused on carbon as a by-product of building and construction,” writes guest editor Elisa Iturbe in Log 47, “making it seem that at the ecological brink, architecture’s most pressing concern is energy efficiency.”
“Overcoming Carbon Form,” Log’s 200-page thematic Fall issue, reconceives architecture's role in climate change, away from sustainability and solutionism and toward architecture's formal complicity and potential agency in addressing the climate crisis. As Iturbe writes, “Decarbonization is not solely a question of technology and buildings systems but also a theoretical question for architecture and the city, one that questions carbon modernity as an obsolete cultural and material foundation for architecture.” To that end, the 24 authors – architects, artists, sociologists, historians, novelists, and policy makers – approach architecture’s role in the climate crisis in widely varied ways. From Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Shéhérazade Giudici on rethinking private property to Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong on the house as power plant; from Holly Jean Buck on carbon sequestration infrastructure to Mimi Sheller on the military-infrastructural complex; from Skender Luarasi on anticipation to Albert Pope on urban obsolescence; from Lizzie Yarina on neoliberal resilience schemes and Gökçe Günel on a status quo utopia to Tahl Kaminer on the impossibility of autarky and Douglas Spencer on the fantasy of island life. Also in this issue, Kiel Moe on new perspectives, Rania Ghosn on geographic externalities, Laurence Lumley on asphalt, Ingrid Halland on plastic, Greg Lindquist on rolling coal, and Daniel A. Barber on air-conditioning. Plus an excerpt from Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement and a conversation with Rhiana Gunn-Wright on the Green New Deal.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Summer 2019
From classical sculpture to video game graphics, from Renaissance frescoes to Instagrammable buildings, Log 46 (Summer 2019) brings together architects, artists, and historians, both new and established voices, who examine the multiple forces that shape architectural discourse. In this open issue, David Gissen discusses new research on ancient civilizations; Viola Ago assesses compositional physics; Sharel Liu investigates how coliving spaces attempt to build community; Jimenez Lai explores architects’ relationships with irony and sincerity; Charles Waldheim revisits the avant-garde qualities of the airport jet bridge; and Mark Foster Gage and Michael Meredith spar over categories in architecture. Log 46 also features a number of pieces that rethink architectural surfaces: Ivi Diamantopoulou challenges architects to look up at the ceiling, Camilo José Vergara documents anonymous street art, Patrick Templeton reports on a drawing machine, and Adam Longenbach empowers misreadings of the US-Mexico border wall. This issue also includes fiction by David Heymann, an interview with OMA’s Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli by Andrés Ramirez, a look at the TWA Hotel by Cynthia Davidson, book reviews by Edward Eigen and Philip Ursprung, a letter from Bangkok by François Roche, a new appraisal of Dante and Bramante by Pier Paolo Tamburelli, and Thomas Daniell’s translation of Tadao Ando’s first published essay.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Winter/Spring 2019
From Pritzker Prize laureate Wang Shu on Song dynasty landscape paintings to Elizabeth Diller on orchestrating an opera on the High Line, architects thinking transformatively and reflecting critically are at the heart of Log 45 (Winter/Spring 2019). In this open issue, architects, curators, and critics observe the world at both the large and small scale, from Paola Antonelli on curating “Broken Nature” at the Milan Triennale, to Peter Trummer on an inoperable Anthropocene window; from Stephan Trüby on right-wing reconstruction efforts in Germany, to Patrick Templeton on “Adjacencies” at Yale. This issue also features reviews of a number of recent books: Henry N. Cobb reflects on the role of philosophy in Schinkel; Jeffrey Kipnis analyzes Cobb’s own newly published memoir; Lars Lerup responds to a Call to Order; Caspar Pearson compares two books produced for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale; David Erdman introduces Possible Mediums; and Douglas Hartig tackles MOS Architects’ forthcoming children’s book. Plus, Deborah Fausch on the writing of the late Robert Venturi; Dora Epstein Jones on the phenomena of populated plans; Cameron Cortez on a misplaced microwave in Japan; and Graham McKay on Kazuo Shinohara’s artful houses.
Fall 2018
In the 15th anniversary issue of Log, number 44, architects representing diverse perspectives each question, in different ways, the place of architecture and architectural discourse in the world today. As 2018 Venice Biennale Golden Lion recipient Kenneth Frampton asks, “What are architects for in a destitute time?” Similarly, in Zack Saunders’s response to the exhibition #digitaldisobediences, François Roche wonders, for “posthuman, postqueers, postdummies . . . what does it mean to be an architect?” In this issue, Rafael Moneo searches for a new historical paradigm no longer centered on modernism; Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto evaluate the forces that shape their architectural project; Pier Vittorio Aureli offers a comprehensive history of the way the grid has been used to organize the socioeconomics of cities; Michelle Chang proposes vagueness as a critical position and source of creativity; and Michael Meredith curates 44 “low-resolution” houses. George Baird and xx voto respond to Log 42: “Disorienting Phenomenology” and ANY 4: “Architecture and the Feminine,” respectively. Renee Kemp-Rotan and Ludovico Centis evaluate monuments to the complicated American histories of racial injustice and nuclear weapons development. Alicia Imperiale and Christophe Van Gerrewey explore works by Luigi Moretti and OMA. Log 44 also takes stock of the World Trade Center site 15 years after the competition to rebuild Ground Zero in an interview with Daniel Libeskind and an analysis by Fred Bernstein.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Summer 2018
Log 43 responds to the many geometries seen in contemporary forms with The Issue of Geometry, a special section guest edited by architectural designer and educator Cameron Wu. Some 25 years after the digital revolution of the ’90s, Wu asks, “If we are now armed with a more mature understanding of instrumental design tools, how do we reanimate geometry as a design protagonist rather than a mere design enabler or incidental outcome?” The architects’ responses range from Peter Carl’s interest in rhythm to Iman Fayyad’s perspectival anomalies; from Wes Jones’s reassessment of the many relationships of geometry and architecture to Patrik Schumacher’s advocating for tectonism; from Andrew Witt’s concept of “grayboxing” to George L. Legendre’s form haiku. Wu also offers geometric analyses of five recent buildings, and artist Olafur Eliasson, architect Preston Scott Cohen, and architect Henry N. Cobb talk about their advanced uses of geometry. Log 43 also features essays on architecture’s withdrawal from and engagement with architectural austerity, the architecture of crypto mining, and Miesian materiality, as well as a conversation with Japanese architect Hiromi Fujii.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Winter/Spring 2018
“The baggage that phenomenology carries with it in architectural discourse is weighty,” writes guest editor Bryan E. Norwood in Log 42. “This issue of Log aims to lighten the load, or at the very least redistribute it.” Subtitled “Disorienting Phenomenology,” the thematic 204-page Winter/Spring 2018 issue presents 18 essays by philosophers, theorists, art and architectural historians, and architects that range from Mark Jarzombek’s close reading of the first three sentences in Husserl’s Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology to Caroline A. Jones’s historical analysis of phantom phenomena in Doug Wheeler’s work Synthetic Desert; from Charles L. Davis’s speculations on an architectural phenomenology of blackness to Adrienne Brown’s look at the role of space in producing racialization to Jos Boys’s and Sun-Young Park’s explorations of disability. In addition, Norwood – a philosopher/architectural historian – talks with Jorge Otero-Pailos, author of Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern, a key reassessment of the idea of architectural phenomenology first put forth in the mid 20th century.
As Norwood concludes, “Architecture doesn’t need a phenomenology; it needs phenomenologies.” Log 42 is a critical observation of those phenomenologies that reflects architecture’s and society’s increasing awareness of the sociocultural richness to be had in diversity.
Also in this issue: Joseph Bedford rethinks the practice of phenomenology, Kevin Berry projects a new mode of being-in-the-world, Lisa Guenther infiltrates the gated community, Bruce Janz wonders about creativity, Rachel McCann exfoliates the flesh, Winifred E. Newman disputes disembodied visuality, Ginger Nolan historicizes the metahistorical, Dorothée Legrand suspends the reduction, Benjamin M. Roth seeks out meaninglessness, David Theodore inverts the Vitruvian Man, Dylan Trigg excavates a prehistory.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Fall 2017
Log 41 both observes the state of architecture today and devotes 114 pages to a special section called Working Queer, guest-edited by architect Jaffer Kolb. From Hans Tursack’s commentary on “shape architecture” to Michael Young’s valuation of parafiction as a critique of realism; from Lisa Hsieh’s examination of modernology in Japan to Cynthia Davidson’s conversation with Martino Stierli, Log 41 considers both history and the contemporary. In Working Queer, nineteen authors take a similar look at history and the contemporary in articles ranging from homo-fascism in early 20th-century aesthetics to trans gender bathroom typologies for today, as well as methods of work, materials, and mediation that can all be considered queer, or queering, in our pluralist, mediated world.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Spring/Summer 2017
Log 40 assembles a wide-ranging collection of thoughtful essays on some of the most urgent questions and debates in architecture today, bringing them into dialogue with those of architecture’s recent past. The legacy and current status of architectural images are considered from radically different vantages, in Brett Steele’s anecdotal discourse on Zaha Hadid’s 1983 painting The World (89 Degrees), John May’s exacting dissection of “architecture after imaging,” and Hana Gründler’s exploration of the ethical implications of drawing borderlines. The issue features commentary by two contemporary architects on contemporary buildings: V. Mitch McEwen on David Adjaye’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and Elisabetta Terragni on OMA’s Fondazione Prada in Milan. Other highlights include an excerpt from Noah’s Ark, the new collection of Hubert Damisch’s singular writings on architecture; a lively response by Mark Foster Gage to Michael Meredith’s recent Log essay on indifference; and a sampling of new domestic objects designed by architects.
Winter 2017
Log 39 looks at a changed political landscape and an evolving urban environment, offering reflections on architecture and the contemporary city both in the United States and around the world. The Winter 2017 issue features incisive commentary by critics and historians on recently completed buildings – from BIG’s VIA 57 West and WORKac’s 93 Reade Street in New York to Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg to Archi-Depot, a museum dedicated to architecture models in Tokyo. In addition, Michael Meredith, Valéry Didelon, and Eric Owen Moss contribute writing on the aesthetic of indifference, the history and future of OMA’s 1989 Euralille masterplan, and a pseudo-scripture for architects. In a special section, practitioners, critics, and activists address the possibility of architecture in the age of Trump.
Postcard photo by Filip Dujardin.
Fall 2016
After two successive thematic issues, Log 38 (Fall 2016) returns to its classic open form, bringing together myriad perspectives from architecture’s center and periphery. Cynthia Davidson’s expansive interview with New York architect Harry Cobb, of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, illuminates Cobb’s 60-plus years in practice, as well as the history of modernism in America. Eve Blau explores the contexts that drove the 1968 Learning from Las Vegas studio at Yale, and Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Shéhérazade Giudici reevaluate the roots of modern domestic space. Log 38 also features critical perspectives on the current moment in architecture, with reviews of OMA’s Fondaco dei Tedeschi, reflections on this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, and reactions to Brexit from architects and educators affected by the vote, and even an imaginative look at the work of Sam Jacob Studio from 20 years in the future.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Spring/Summer 2016
Log 37 takes readers inside “The Architectural Imagination,” the exhibition curated by Log editor Cynthia Davidson and architect Mónica Ponce de León for the United States Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. This special 240-page color issue of Log features 12 new speculative projects designed for four sites in Detroit by visionary American architectural teams. The cataLog also presents writing by the curators, an interview with Detroit planning director Maurice Cox, and essays exploring Detroit’s past and present, as well as the role of imagination in architecture, by critics, theorists, and historians.
Winter 2016
Guest edited by architect Greg Lynn, Log 36: ROBOLOG explores the challenges and potentials posed to architecture by the rapidly accelerating field of robotics. Tossing aside the usual fabrication-focused discourse around robots, the 23 contributors to ROBOLOG investigate topics ranging from hyperrealistic robotic drag queens to machine vision to buildings that move. In addition to a collection of thought-provoking essays, this issue includes conversations with Elizabeth Diller, Nicholas de Monchaux and Ken Goldberg, and Chuck Hoberman. Rather than providing easy answers or touting cutting-edge technologies, ROBOLOG offers provocations to both architects and theorists. Robotic sensors, actuators, and networks have fundamentally transformed the world around us. What will architecture choose to do with them?
Fall 2015
Log 35 offers cutting-edge architectural thought, both historical and speculative, for our hyperconnected world. The 21 contributors to this Fall 2015 issue offer new thinking from across and beyond the discipline of architecture, from investigations of architecture’s encounters with politics, economics, and art to focused investigations of individual architects and studios, including Sou Fujimoto, Dogma, and Takefumi Aida. Log 35 also includes a 32-page excerpt from Benjamin H. Bratton’s forthcoming book The Stack, which explores the consequences and possibilities of planetary-scale computation and the new geopolitical architecture it represents, plus a review of the book by Jeffrey Kipnis.
Spring/Summer 2015
Why would an architecture journal devote an entire issue to thinking about food? Log 34: The Food Issue explores food in its many aspects and reveals a boundless realm of contemporary cultural production. In this Spring/Summer 2015 issue, contributions from inside and outside the worlds of food and architecture – from chefs and architects to artists, critics, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and eaters – highlight the many parallels between cuisine and architecture (beyond the basic needs for food and shelter) and demonstrate that food is everywhere and in everything. Guest edited by Jan Åman and Savinien Caracostea of AtelierSlice, Log 34 features renowned chefs, including Ferran Adrià, Dan Barber, Massimo Bottura, Magnus Nilsson, Jacques Pépin, and Christina Tosi, as well as critically acclaimed artists like Carsten Höller, Tobias Rehberger, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. In short, countless reasons to focus on food today, from the obvious to the surprising.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Winter 2015
Log 33 delivers emerging currents and renewed interests in architectural thought. It includes a thorough examination of object-oriented philosophy: two essays offering contrasting positions on its value for the architectural discipline as well as a conversation between philosopher Graham Harman and architects Todd Gannon, David Ruy, and Tom Wiscombe. Objects are invoked throughout the issue in myriad other ways – in essays on the postcritical legacy, architecture and objecthood, shape and character, history and machines – highlighting the currency and multivalence of the term object in the discourse today. Log 33, which follows two best-selling issues, also presents Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s “World Machines,” the new preface to his recently republished book The Railway Journey (plus an introduction to his work by Sanford Kwinter) as well as critical commentary on architectural events from around the world, essays on urban noise and architectural acoustics, new explorations of the architect’s hand in drawing, and more.
This sold-out issue of Log is available as a PDF.
Fall 2024
The 184 pages of Log 62 present all new authors, including 15 South Americans in a special section guest edited by Brazilian architect and critic Jaime Solares Carmona. Called Far South, the section observes contemporary architecture and criticism in South America by a generation that Solares calls “equidistant from the modernist ethos of previous generations while also distancing itself from a more radical critical approach that leans toward an ‘anthropologization’ of architecture.”
Far South includes new English translations of seminal essays by architect and teacher Sérgio Ferro on brutalist architecture during the Brazilian dictatorship, and the late Argentine critic and theorist Marina Waisman’s incisive analysis of critical regionalism. Argentine-born Florencia Rodríguez, director of the 2025 Chicago Biennial, discusses the dispersion of discourse, and in Bolivia, Guido Alejo Mamani documents Indigenous avant-garde aesthetics. In Brazil, Frederico Costa and Solares unpack the box as an urban typology, and Mariana Wilderom compares what she calls the “everyday monumentality” of São Paulo and Medellín, Colombia. In Chile, Alejandra Celedón grapples with architectural autonomy and social responsibility in the work of Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Alejandro Aravena, and Smiljan Radic; Carlos Eduardo Binato de Castro and Suelen Camerin examine houses by Radic and Miguel Eyquem Astorga; and José Luis Uribe Ortiz considers the role of local materials in building throughout South America. In Colombia, Plan: B Arquitectos outlines an agenda for “re-activism.” And in Ecuador, Mariana Alves Barbosa maps the global reach of women architects through the Architecture Biennial of Quito.
Also in Log 62, Michael Speaks remembers cultural critic Fredric Jameson and his contribution to architecture theory; Fernanda Canales looks at the 19th- and early 20th-century Home Improvement Movement to challenge architecture to do more rather than less; Manuel Álvarez Diestro records the need for air conditioners around the world; and Lachlan Summers investigates the lifespan of concrete in the face of earthquakes in Mexico City.