Log Supplement

De Vylder Drawings

These recently published drawings by Jan De Vylder supplement Christophe Van Gerrewey’s Log 51 essay, “Drawing Rescues Architecture,” on the role of drawing in architectural practice today.

MOS as Deadpan

In his Log 51 essay “Deadpan (in) Architecture,” Kyle Miller describes a “deadpan tonality in the aesthetic, representational, and rhetorical project of MOS,” and illustrates its effects in six of their projects.

Genbakudo

In his Log 51 essay “Half-Life,” Thomas Daniell revisits the unbuilt Genbakudō (Temple of Atomic Catastrophes), a memorial proposed by Kyoto-born architect Sei’ichi Shirai without a site or client following the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the 1954 Castle Bravo thermonuclear test.

Sei'ichi Shirai Architectural Institute, 2018. Supervision: Ikuma Shirai. Production: Makoto Wakabayashi. CG creation: Takenaka Corporation.

Tired . . . and Behaving Poorly

Supplementing his Log 50 essay on his Two Scrolls project, David Eskenazi's videos document the behaviors of two scales of physical and digital-simulation paper models as they are manipulated and deformed under real-world conditions and a physics engine.

Modeling Sound

Designers today use digital models to explore not only how a space will look and feel but also what it will sound like. Acoustic consultants at Arup began experimenting with auralizations (sound simulations) in the mid-1990s, building the SoundLab at their New York office in 1998. The sound simulation technology is now used in 15 of their offices around the world. Produced by combining sounds recorded in an anechoic chamber with the predicted acoustic signature of a space, or how it will reflect and absorb sound waves based on its geometry and materials, the auralizations allow designers, clients, and stakeholders to hear what the space will sound like before it exists. Unlike the diagrams and analyses used in the past, these simulations enable clients to participate in design and planning processes based on the experience of sound.

Auralizations are used in projects of many types and scales, to achieve precise acoustics for performances, to create comfortable work and healthcare spaces, to demonstrate the impact of new infrastructure such as high-speed rail lines and wind farms, and more. Recent work includes an immersive sound installation, Hear Me: Voices of the Epidemic, at the New York City AIDS Memorial and a reverberation chamber for Björk’s Cornucopia tour.

Biden’s Oval

Supplementing his Log 50: Model Behavior essay, architect Tyler Survant examines Joe Biden’s renovations as the most recent example of “Modeling and Remodeling the Oval Office.”

The January 23 cover of the Economist depicts newly elected President Joe Biden, wearing a suit and tie, face mask, and his signature aviator sunglasses, arriving at the White House, its walls stained with giant orange splatters. Biden brings with him a mop and bucket. The illustration suggests both the immediate chore of deep cleaning the White House (the site of three COVID-19 outbreaks in four months) and the broader political task of cleaning up after a virulent president who undermined institutions and democratic processes. The headline reads “Morning after in America,” a play on Ronald Reagan’s iconic 1984 “Morning in America” campaign ad. In 2021, the country awakens to a new dawn… and a nasty hangover.

During Biden’s inauguration, the White House was disinfected and the Oval Office restyled. In Biden’s Oval, much remains unchanged: the room still features the Resolute Desk, now used by eight presidents since John F. Kennedy first brought it to the Oval Office, the gold curtains, cream sofas, and buttery chairs also used by Trump’s predecessors, and Trump’s gray damask wallpaper. But Biden has replaced Trump’s pale sunburst rug (commissioned by Reagan) with a royal blue rug (commissioned by Bill Clinton). And gone are Trump’s US military battle flags, last seen in Richard Nixon’s Oval Office, and his portrait of Andrew Jackson, the populist president who forcibly removed Native Americans. In Jackson’s place now hangs a portrait of Benjamin Franklin, founding father and inventor, who, Biden aides say, represents the president’s belief in science. Busts of civil rights activists Cesar Chavez and Rosa Parks also grace the room, as does a bronze sculpture by Allan Houser, a Chiricahua Apache artist. In the privileged position above the fireplace mantel – a location often occupied by George Washington – hangs a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led the US out of the Great Depression with a series of New Deal reforms. Roosevelt models the behavior Biden seeks to emulate as a president confronting the crises of a raging pandemic and struggling economy, enduring racial inequities, a warming planet, and rising political violence.

House Beautiful characterized Biden’s Oval Office makeover in domestic terms: “If there’s one thing many of us have learned from spending more time at home during the pandemic, it’s the importance of truly making a room your own.” In fact, the White House is the consummate live-work space and the Oval Office the ultimate home office. But the room is more than just a work space; it’s also a political stage. Its decor is a tool for emotional persuasion and cultural influence. The new deputy director of Oval Office operations, Ashley Williams, explained to the Washington Post that “it was important for President Biden to walk into an Oval that looked like America and started to show the landscape of who he is going to be as president.” The Biden remodel is decoration diplomacy, an appeal to reason, to inclusion, and to America’s “better angels.”

On Friday, November 13, 2020, 194 people gathered on Zoom to discuss Log 49 special section The Return of Nature with guest editors Gökhan Kodalak and Sanford Kwinter, as well as author Erin Manning and Log editor Cynthia Davidson. In this “launch,” hosted by the Pratt Institute School of Architecture, the conversation ranged from climate change and the false nature-design dichotomy to the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza and Alfred North Whitehead.

COLOR CORRECTIONS

Supplementing their Log 49 essay “Color Corrections,” Elena Manferdini and Christina Griggs illustrate the possibilities of color in the digital age through the work of Atelier Manferdini. According to the authors, color can open up the field of architecture “to enable multiple subjectivities, to bring in new references, and to include more voices.”

For the group show “When You Touch About Me, I Think Myself,” Atelier Manferdini contributed a hyperrealistic digital landscape of colorful dahlias, framed by three printed canvases and enriched via an augmented reality app. When visitors interact with the landscape by touching a tablet screen, butterflies, birds, and insects appear to swarm. Visitors can then share images and videos of their artificial experiences on social media, engaging additional viewers with the work.

The design for the facade of the Kaida Center of Science and Design in Dongguan, China, uses a glass-encased print with a mirrored backing for the exterior panels. The result is that visitors can see an adjacent park partially reflected in the canvas, creating a combination of real and artificial views of nature. The interactive wall, which also has a mirrored backing, allows visitors to catch glimpses of themselves reflected in the landscape and encourages them to participate in the construction of the image of the facade by spinning colorful modules.

Inverted Landscapes is a set of two colorful interventions that form the threshold of the Zev Yaroslavsky Family Support Center in Los Angeles: a patterned print encased in glass and a continuation of the geometric motif onto the floor through custom color tiles. Working in conversation with the center’s healthcare workers, the project was designed to engage visitors. When the morning sun hits the glass, the colors appear more intense from the inside and, due to a low emission film, the glass appears less transparent from the outside, providing privacy to families meeting with psychologists.

Log Knot

In 2018, Sasa Zivkovic, coprincipal of HANNAH, led a team with Brian Havener to design and install Log Knot as part of a broader material research project of the Robotic Construction Laboratory at Cornell University. Using 3D scanning and robotic fabrication to join fallen timber and tree forks – which are typically regarded as waste – into a looping, self-supporting structure, the project questions conventional building practices and material cycles. Log Knot was installed on the campus in August and disassembled in March 2019. The logs became firewood.

On Wednesday, October 7, 2020, Log 48 guest editor Bryony Roberts and authors Deborah Garcia and Jess Myers presented their work in conversation with editor Cynthia Davidson as part of the Pratt Architecture Provocations series. They discussed kinship, authority, care, history, and media in architectural practice, among other topics.

LOG 48 SUPPLEMENT

About the Cover: Someday we can

The drawing featured on the cover of Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice is from a floor-to-architrave mural that spanned the back of the column-lined statuary court of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery at the University of Buffalo. Accompanying the wall drawing of sprawling black lines, caricatures, and poems was a tiered table of everyday objects painted white and covered with similar graphics. Together, these constitute Someday We Can, a 2017 installation by London-born, New York–based artist Shantell Martin.

Using thick black markers or spray paint, Martin draws spontaneously, often performing her drawings in front of a live audience and inviting them to engage with the creative process. Treating the drawing as a free-form stream of consciousness, she develops an attitude of positive inquiry rather than explicit narrative. Between the faces and stick figures, Martin inserts short plays on words and poems dealing with questions of identity, knowledge, and agency. In Someday We Can, she asks, “How we know, how we sea, who we be, how we grow, how we share, how we care, how we give, how we flow, how we sew?”

Over the past decade, Martin has worked with a wide range of artists and performers as well as fashion brands and cultural institutions. In 2017, she collaborated with Pulitzer Prize–winning rapper Kendrick Lamar, drawing the background for his performance at Art Basel Miami. In 2019, Martin covered the multi-tiered promenade of the New York City Ballet’s David H. Koch Theater in her swirling black lines. Working commercially as well, she has added her signature graphic style to everything from t-shirts and shoes for Puma and Nike to a miniature silver greenhouse for Tiffany & Co. Her most recent artworks include The Oculus, a 21-screen video installation of white lines on a black background that appeared throughout the World Trade Center transit hub, and The May Room and Church on Governors Island in New York City (see “Observations on an Immersive Drawing,” Log 48). Shantell Martin: Lines, her first monograph, was published in March 2020, by Heni Publishing in London.

On Friday, April 10, 2020, host and Log 48 author Ana Miljački spoke with editor Cynthia Davidson and guest editor Bryony Roberts on MIT’s WAWD?RADIO. The conversation ranged from the history of the Anyone Corporation and its changing mission over the years to the political and cultural forces behind recent and upcoming thematic issues: Overcoming Carbon Form, Expanding Modes of Practice, and Model Behavior. 

LOG 48 SUPPLEMENT

The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects

In her essay “Where the Worldviews Are” from Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice, composer Ashley Fure discusses her 2014–17 opera The Force of Things. This immersive installation opera, developed in collaboration with her brother Adam Fure, features hanging paracords and composite “hides” that vibrate and rattle, registering the infrasound emitted by subwoofers.

Log 48 Supplement

6 Work Surfaces

In fall 2019, Katy Barkan, founder of Now Here, exhibited the installation 6 Work Surfaces as part of “Supersposition” at the UCLA Perloff Hall Gallery in Los Angeles. The installation reorganizes architectural fragments – doorways, corridors, rooms, stairs – and their red-carpeted “shadows," each of which take on its own formal logic.

LOG 47 SUPPLEMENT

ROLLING COAL

Supplementing his Log 47: Overcoming Carbon Form essay, “Painting with Carbon,” New York–based artist Greg Lindquist documents the culture of rolling coal and truck pulls. Project, documentation, and narration: Greg Lindquist. Video editing: Maxwell Paparella.

Log 47 SUPPLEMENT

PLANET FITNESS: ANTHROPO-FRONTIERISM AND THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 

MILES GERTLER & IGOR BRAGADO

The ultimate frontier of the Anthropocene might well be the human body. Or so it seems, according to a freshly available arsenal of fitness regimens, survival guides, academic reports, news media, and cultural products, which demonstrate . . .

Log 46 Supplement

Talking with Thomas Daniell

Watch and listen as Log author and protagonist Thomas Daniell talks with editor Cynthia Davidson about his philosophy of translation. A New Zealand–born architect, historian, and educator who teaches at Kyoto University, Daniell also translates the writings of a number of Japanese architects. This discussion supplements his Log 46 article “Finding a Voice,” which introduces his translation of Tadao Ando’s first published essay, “Urban Guerrilla Dwellings.”