“The baggage that phenomenology carries with it in architectural discourse is weighty,” writes guest editor Bryan E. Norwood in Log 42. “This issue of Log aims to lighten the load, or at the very least redistribute it.” Subtitled “Disorienting Phenomenology,” the thematic 204-page Winter/Spring 2018 issue presents 18 essays by philosophers, theorists, art and architectural historians, and architects that range from Mark Jarzombek’s close reading of the first three sentences in Husserl’s Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology to Caroline A. Jones’s historical analysis of phantom phenomena in Doug Wheeler’s work Synthetic Desert; from Charles L. Davis’s speculations on an architectural phenomenology of blackness to Adrienne Brown’s look at the role of space in producing racialization to Jos Boys’s and Sun-Young Park’s explorations of disability. In addition, Norwood – a philosopher/architectural historian – talks with Jorge Otero-Pailos, author of Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern, a key reassessment of the idea of architectural phenomenology first put forth in the mid 20th century.
As Norwood concludes, “Architecture doesn’t need a phenomenology; it needs phenomenologies.” Log 42 is a critical observation of those phenomenologies that reflects architecture’s and society’s increasing awareness of the sociocultural richness to be had in diversity.
Also in this issue: Joseph Bedford rethinks the practice of phenomenology, Kevin Berry projects a new mode of being-in-the-world, Lisa Guenther infiltrates the gated community, Bruce Janz wonders about creativity, Rachel McCann exfoliates the flesh, Winifred E. Newman disputes disembodied visuality, Ginger Nolan historicizes the metahistorical, Dorothée Legrand suspends the reduction, Benjamin M. Roth seeks out meaninglessness, David Theodore inverts the Vitruvian Man, Dylan Trigg excavates a prehistory.
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