Five years ago I began working with a logbook to collect my ideas around architecture. It immediately felt like a natural act of materialising my thoughts, as a way of digesting impulses that affect me. The logbook is a tool that can be used to make sense of things that are not yet comprehensible; a medium to perceive the world. Over the years, as I filled many logbooks, I created a condensed archive of my views and positions that I can re-integrate in my profession. Having access to this personal collection gives me enormous power. As an architect, I am challenged in my everyday work with building tasks that require conceptualisation and presentation of good and valuable solutions. My logbooks, that I would also define as ‘work journals’, are the sources that help me to be more efficient in coming to diverse conclusions and varieties of options of solving a design task. Looking up entries that fit into the immediate topic, or even random entries always start a path of contextual reflection that supports and enriches insight. Since I use this tool, I think differently and more intensively both about architecture’s physical presence and its intangibility. My logbook is both a space for inner dialogue and a catalyst for creativity. It serves as a link between basic ideas and architecture, and is, to me, crucial in the creative process as a designer or architect. • Adorno wrote about the archive of one’s own. This phrase immediately struck me as describing a project I had started a couple of years earlier as the way to go to the foundations of architecture. Its core is to find out more about my positions, beliefs and attitudes around architecture. Or to quote John Hejduk in Architectures in Love: Sketchbook Notes , ‘I want to know what the soul of architecture might be’. A logbook is a medium well-suited to imagine the world and record all the ideas and considerations in it. Now my logbooks form my own archive, a collection that preserves my thoughts and experiences of the built realm, with access whenever I need it. Adorno pointed out that subjective and private moments belong to no other than the subject themselves. Adorno’s 1931 dissertation, Construction of the Aesthetic is an analysis and critique of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. The critique pointed towards Kierkegaard’s introvert definition of ‘reality’, in his view experienced in a pure inwardness without reference to the outer world. Following Adorno’s arguments, including the outer world gives us necessary reactions: as architects we work at the intersection of nature, landscape, the built world and people – there is meaning in everything. Anything can make an impression and has reason to be acknowledged. Outer impulses and subsequent reflection, as seeing and perceiving, are the sources and process that ultimately nurture my logbook.
Perception of my world is tightly connected with the way I move in it. I am Benjamin’s flâneur who walks without intention through dense cities. I am the wanderer who walks restlessly through a landscape as a romantic experience of nature. I am the pilgrim in motion for deeper spiritual reasons, observing my inner world, walking as meditation or to overcome pain or powerlessness. Just small pieces of the world can be experienced and understood. A logbook helps me compose my thoughts and emotions to find order for my ideas. Most things that I note refer to architecture or are observations about the world seen through an architecturally- trained eye. In daily work as an architect or in travel to different places with unknown structures, vigilant watching and walking constructs a new awareness of the world. My logbook makes me reflect, sort ideas and trains my sensibilities. The overall output of the whole logbook project is an intensification of the creative mind: I break down impressions and experiences to something I can use. •
Evelyn Osvath
A transcription and translation of a logbook page– a wall in Italy, a forest in Germany: date, place, subject, graphic
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