Log 54: Coauthoring

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.