Log 49 Roundtable: The Return of Nature

In The Return of Nature, a special section in Log 49 (Summer 2020), guest editors Gökhan Kodalak and Sanford Kwinter take a first step toward rectifying what they call the “bifurcation of nature and culture.” This problematic in architectural discourse and practice asserts design’s dominance over nature, which in turn underpins the social, economic, health, and climate crises confronting the world today. Join the guest editors, author Erin Manning, and Log editor Cynthia Davidson in discussing this first step and the philosophical groundwork in redefining architecture’s relation with nature at this online roundtable discussion on Friday, November 13 at 6pm.

To join the event and receive a link for the livestream, register herehttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/log-49-roundtable-the-return-of-nature-tickets-127764939373

Participants:

Cynthia Davidson is an architecture editor and critic based in New York City. She is the founding editor of Log: Observations on Architecture and the Contemporary City, a tri-annual journal begun in 2003, and editor of the Writing Architecture Series books published by MIT Press. Both publication programs are projects of the Anyone Corporation, a nonprofit, architecture think tank she has directed since 1991. She was the founding editor of the architecture tabloid magazine ANY (1993–2000) and of the “Any” book series, which documented ten international architecture conferences that she organized in the 1990s on the condition of architecture at the end of the 20th century. Ms. Davidson has also written for a number of periodicals, including Architectural Record in New York and Arquitectura Viva in Madrid.

Gökhan Kodalak is an architect, theorist, and historian, who recently completed his PhD dissertation Spinoza and Architecture at Cornell University. He is the founder of the Istanbul-based design office ABOUTBLANK, and he teaches at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture. Kodalak’s research has been awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Institute for Comparative Modernities and published in Spinoza’s Philosophy of Ratio, Deleuze Studies Journal, and Footprint. His work has been exhibited at the Johnson Museum of Art, Antalya Architecture Biennial, and Plovdiv Architecture Week.

Sanford Kwinter is Professor of Science and Design at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture and Honorary Professor of Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. His books include Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2001), Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar, 2008), Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium (Actar, 2010) and the forthcoming What Is Energy and How Else Might We Think About It?.

Erin Manning is a research chair at Concordia University, Montreal, in speculative pragmatism, art and pedagogy. She is a philosopher, artist, dancer, and research-creation practitioner. She is also the founder of SenseLab, a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Her recent books include For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke UP, 2020), The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016), and Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013).