The Conversation Pit: 20 Years of Log

Celebrating Log’s 20-year milestone of observations on architecture and the contemporary city, now representing a generation of critical discourse, The Conversation Pit: 20 Years of Log, a live roundtable discussion moderated by Cynthia Davidson (SoA Visiting Faculty and Log Founder & Editor), will turn the tables on former guest editors and contributors of Log to ask critical questions on discourse:

“Where is architecture today?”

“Where and what is the world that architecture shapes?”

“What keeps you up at night?”

Participants include Darell Fields, Sanford Kwinter, Sylvia Lavin, Michael Meredith, Florencia Pita, Monica Ponce de Leon, and Cameron Wu.

On September 30, 2003, the first issue of Log was launched at Urban Center Books on Madison Avenue in New York City. Like a ship’s log, the new journal set out to observe and record architecture discourse and the built environment in a literary format, promoting writing in and on architecture over architectural images. As editor Cynthia Davidson wrote in that issue:

“A log, by definition, is a way of recording observations of the present through writing in time. Seen against the backdrop of a culture of images and rhetoric, and in its distance from both the academy and mass media, Log offers the possibility of a critical context for writing about architecture today—for observing its movement or lack thereof, its images, its texts, and its subtexts. In the complexity of these times, this writing, these observations, may begin to define not only where architecture is moving, but where we too, the observers, are headed.”

From Log 1 to Log 58, these cumulative pages—all 9,420 of them!—present a generation of developing ideas. While some of architecture’s concerns have changed radically, others remain pertinent and persistent. Over two decades Log has proved to be a flexible and resilient platform for bringing together both new and established voices in productive critical dialog.