Humanity has reached an ecological brink and against this daunting horizon, architecture’s environmental response, focused largely on building technology and techno-optimism, has failed. The climate crisis is intensifying unabated, in part because architecture, as both a discipline and a practice, continues to replicate the spatial, cultural, and material patterns that constitute an energy-intensive way of life. Following the conceptual framework of Log 47: Overcoming Carbon Form, an issue that repositions architecture’s ecological impact within a spatial discourse, Confronting Carbon Form lays bare architecture’s place at the center of carbon modernity. Without this challenge to our dominant modes of thought, architecture will be unable to address the climate crisis, and so, as a necessary first step to overcoming carbon form, this exhibition curates a series of artifacts that exemplify carbon form, providing a direct confrontation with the spatial paradigm that must be supplanted and transformed.

Stanley Cho is cofounder of Outside Development, a design and research practice. Cho studied in University of California, Los Angeles's Design Media Arts program and the Yale School of Architecture. His works have been shown at international film festivals such as Chicago and Oberhausen. He has project-managed and designed various public facilities for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Elisa Iturbe is an assistant professor at The Cooper Union. Her research and writing are currently focused on the relationship between energy, power, and form. Iturbe also teaches courses on fossil capitalism and carbon modernity at the Yale School of Architecture and at Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Her writings have been published in AA Files, Log, Perspecta, New York Review of Architecture, and Antagonismos. She guest-edited Log 47, titled Overcoming Carbon Form and cowrote a book with Peter Eisenman titled Lateness (Princeton University Press, 2020). She is cofounder of Outside Development, a design and research practice.

Alican Taylan is a PhD student in architecture history at Cornell University. His research is currently centered on environmental history and early modern architecture. Recently, he was a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute's graduate architecture and urban design department and has worked in the offices of Peter Eisenman, Shigeru Ban, and Thomas Leeser. He contributed to the 2018 Turkish pavilion at the Venice Biennale, cocurated the first alumni-run exhibition at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture, Aesthetics of Prosthetics (2019), and collaborated with artist Blane De St. Croix on the exhibition design of How to Move a Landscape (2020) at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts.