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.