Historically, logs were used in ship navigation to record daily events, weather conditions, and to leave a trail. A logbook describes an itinerary, an ongoing story through time and space, as we can see with the logbooks of Odysseus and his adventurous ten year journey home, or James Cook as he mapped his travels through the Pacific Ocean. It has neither an end nor a predefined aim: it embraces the process, the motion, the intermediate, the inside, the outside, the visible, the invisible. Blaise Pascal, mathematician and philosopher, wrote notes on theology and philosophy, published in1670 as Pensées. His notes were all on loose paper, un-ordered, describing an open and fragmented collection of ideas that I have applied to my logs. Chronology supports archiving, but there are other principles that go beyond simple tracking.
Graphic and visual tools belong to the ‘official’ language of the architect. But it is not the only legitimate form of expression – there are things better expressed in words. Writing captures information at different layers: the way I write, what I write, the mood I write in, the language I use. Applied to the whole concept of working with a logbook, graphics and writing are my instruments. The actual logbooks are tiny and portable. There are times I write everyday. Sometimes the work is less intensive and I don’t make entries for a while, thus presenting fragmentary pieces of my architectural journey. Each entry starts with a spatial and temporal marker and an architectural archetype descriptor.
Evelyn Osvath
A transcription and translation of a logbook page, a mountain and a line: date, place, subject, graphic
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
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