Author Description

In Log 63, poet Emily Stewart walks around Graz and thinks of “Doreen Massey’s notion of ‘throwntogetherness,’ a term she uses to gather the multifarious threads of what it means to think speculatively in space and time.” In a sense, this open issue of Log is an example of that throwntogetherness, with threads connecting ideas and voices, across time and space, on a range of concerns in and about architecture today. From the new, forthcoming translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, the chapter “This Will Kill That,” on the tension between the book and the building, plays against Cynthia Davidson’s synthesized report on three new books, three projects in Los Angeles, and an exhibition in New York. In Houston, Dora Epstein Jones reviews “The Sixth Sphere,” an exhibition that reflects architecture’s approach to ecology, while François Roche, recalling time in Bangkok, indicts academia for climate hypocrisy, and Casey Mack, in New York, investigates suspected greenwashing at Foster + Partners’ new Park Avenue skyscraper. In Tokyo, Kengo Kuma remembers his mentor Hiroshi Hara, while in Brooklyn, An Tairan remembers his, Kurt W. Forster. Wes Jones assesses what was lost in the Los Angeles fires, while Béatrice Grenier questions what was rebuilt in Paris after the Notre-Dame inferno. Lorenzo Degli Esposti proposes a localized canon for Milanese modernism, and David Buege evaluates the legacy of modernism in Thomas Phifer’s new art museum in Warsaw. Neil Levine revisits the postmodern turn via a 1963 debate between Norman Mailer and Vincent Scully, while Park Myers talks with curator Amber Esseiva about “Dear Mazie,” an exhibition in Virginia on a Black and queer modernist architect, and Ferda Kolatan contemplates modernist mythology in his review of the film The Brutalist.