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.