Log 22

Log 22: The Absurd gets serious about the seemingly irrational side of architecture. Guest edited by Michael Meredith of MOS, this special thematic issue identifies the funny, ugly, contradictory, and more fuzzy realms of architecture, disavowing the purported orderliness of disciplinary presumptions to uncloak the implausibility at its core (maybe even its origin) and present new possibilities for experimentation. Sketches, tweets, a book of exorcisms, a comic, and a special DVD are presented alongside critical and provocative essays on hoarding, disaster, failure, and bowlers (as in hats). Log 22 features: Sylvia Lavin on architecture's accommodation of hoarding; Jacques Ranciere on the conundrums of art and life; and Lucia Allais on Superstudio's 'Salvages of Italian Historic Centers,' a 1974 project presented here for the first time in English. Also in the issue: Mark Jarzombek on Bruno Taut's attack of seriousness; David Foster Wallace on Kafka's funniness; Amanda Reeser Lawrence on the self-influence of James Stirling; Caroline O'Donnell on Karl Rosenkranz's aesthetic of ugliness; and K. Michael Hays and Marrikka Trotter on fictions in recent architecture. Plus: a comic by Jimenez Lai; a spectrum of social orderliness by Jeffrey Kipnis; an overlooked Donald Judd project; machines by Francois Roche; tweets from the Bauhaus; a DVD by MOS; and much more.