los angeles CALIFORNIA

The tri-annual magazine Log, which focuses on “observations on architecture and the contemporary city,” was first launched ten years ago by the Anyone project in New York as a reaction to—and especially a resistance to—the seductive power of the image in media today.

lecture: Cynthia DAVIDSON, “Image and Word: A Critical Context.”
Wednesday, 10/16
7.00 p.m. / W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
SCI-Arc Campus
960 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles, California 90013

[LIVE STREAM]

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2013

The influential Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) invoked the productive possibilities of crisis, writing that history is a “project of crisis” (progetto di crisi). In this entry in the Writing Architecture series, Marco Biraghi explores Tafuri’s multifaceted and often knotty oeuvre, using the historian’s concept of a project of crisis as a lens through which to examine his historical construction of contemporary architecture.

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2011

In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of “pure,” but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit of the possibility of an absolute architecture, the other is the space of the city, its extensive organization, and its government. Politics is agonism through separation and confrontation; the very condition of architectural form is to separate and be separated. . . .

2011

Digital technologies have changed architecture—the way it is taught, practiced, managed, and regulated. But if the digital has created a “paradigm shift” for architecture, which paradigm is shifting? In The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Mario Carpo points to one key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies. Carpo highlights two examples of identicality crucial to the shaping of architectural modernity: in the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti’s invention of architectural design, according to which a building is an identical copy of the architect’s design; and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrixes, imprints, or molds.

venice ITALY

Join Log editor Cynthia Davidson at the 2012 Venice Biennale for a conversation on writing and architecture with contributors Pier Vittorio Aureli, Luis Fernández-Galiano, Sanford Kwinter, and François Roche.

Writing Architecture: The Common Ground of the Printed Page
Tuesday, 08/28
2.30–3.30 pm / Spazio Esedra
Giardini della Biennale
(Adjacent to Book Pavilion)
Sestiere Castello, 30122
Venezia, Italy