What’s the Matter with Canon?
September 2023
Our third issue, What’s the Matter with Canon?, considers the question of how best to engage with the biases we’ve inherited. Are well-known works of architecture considered valuable within the discourse because of their intrinsic worth? Or is their perceived value a function of their ubiquity? This question underlies the very notion of architecture’s canon; a set of common reference points for those studying and working in our field.
The issue brings to the fore questions of land and authorship, the role of media and narrative-making, and even the complex and nuanced function of personal networks in the elevation of architectural works to the canon. It includes a roundtable discussion, What’s in a Name?, with Ajay Manthripragada, Alex Oetzel, and Letícia Wouk Almino; What Excellence?, a conversation with Yen Ha; The Media Ecosystem of Architecture, a conversation with Eva Hagberg; and This Land Is Not My Land, an essay by Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash.
Our previous thread offered a glimpse into architectural education and featured an image essay by Leonid Furmansky in addition to conversations with Ekin Erar, Leyuan Li, and Zaid Kashef Alghata.
Pouya Khadem, Sebastián López Cardozo, Mai Okimoto, and Lauren Phillips
with Ajay Manthripragada, Alex Oetzel, Letícia Wouk Almino
with Yen Ha
The Media Ecosystem of Architecture
with Eva Hagberg
by Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash
CROSS-TALK
I Would Prefer Not To, an oral history project produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab, invites practitioners to reflect on the significance of rejecting an architectural commission. In the podcast’s November 2023 episode, host Ana Miljački speaks with Liz Diller (Diller Scofidio + Renfro) about instances when contentious commissions can offer avenues for subversion and positive change. Among other things, Diller reflects on the commission to design Moscow’s Zaryadye Park and the political context which led to her studio’s decision to undertake it.
PLAT 11: Soft equips its readers with tools for blurring and piercing through the disciplinary edges of architecture. In the journal’s latest issue, editors Jane van Velden and Paul DeFazio celebrate the conversational, the sensorial, the fuzzy. The collected contributions paint an architectural landscape of cooperation and compromise. Of note is an article by Hélène Frichot, “A Soft On for Caring Relationships,” which traces contemporary interpretations of the term “soft” in architecture and speculates on their broader significance for the field.
Figuring Territory, Canadian Centre for Architecture’s newest web issue, interrogates the relationship between the semantic implications of the term “territory” and its malleable realities. Edited by Claire Lubell, Alexandra Pereira-Edwards, and Andrew Scheinman, the issue sheds light on the perpetual figuration and re-figuration of territory. In “On Phantom Islands and Unknown Lands,” contributor Victoria Addona takes readers through a cartographic history of “phantom islands,” and reflects on the role of colonial powers in claiming control and ownership over unknown territories through mapping and figuration.
Log 55 (Summer 2022) gathers a series of articles under the broad theme of “Observations on architecture and the contemporary city,” with a subsection, “Notes on the Desert,” guest edited by Francesco Marullo. If the choice of words for the theme titles set a cool and unassuming tone—a decision likely stemming from the issue's origin as an open call—the articles themselves please and surprise. A particularly interesting take is Marija Maric’s in “Bricks, Blocks, and (Block) Chains,” which examines blockchain’s link to the commodification of land.