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 Gokhan 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.

Log 49

Sanford Kwinter

Gökhan Kodalak

Matthew Mullane

Sylvia Lavin

Luke Studebaker

Neeraj Bhatia

Frank Burridge

Emanuele Coccia

Henryetta Duerschlag

Elena Manferdini

Emmett Zeifman

Sasa Zivkovic

Muriel Combes

Erin Manning

Jenny E. Sabin

Peter Trummer

Anyone Corporation

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.

Log 51

Bruce Mau

Dijia Chen

Thomas Daniell

Iman Fayyad

Ruo Jia

Tatiana Knoroz

Harish Krishnamoorthy

Max Kuo

Kyle Miller

Norman Kelley

Véronique Patteeuw

Courtney Richeson

Roi Salgueiro

Christophe Van Gerrewey

Aleksandra Jaeschke

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.

Log 52

Patrick Templeton

Kurt W. Forster

Charles L. Davis II

Fonna Forman

Teddy Cruz

Deborah Gans

David Adjaye

Vickii Howell

Thomas De Monchaux

Whitney Moon

Lindy Roy

Ed Keller

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Books by Gökhan Kodalak