US News lists curator as “one of the 50 best careers of 2010,” and the curator is now popping up as a film role in Hollywood – for example, in When in Rome and Dinner for Schmucks (spoiler alert: the curator is not one of the schmucks). Indeed, having followed the expanding use of the term “curating” over the past three years, we here at Log believe its traditions within architecture can no longer go unexamined. Log 20, published on the occasion of the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale, considers curating architecture both within its contemporary guises and historical lineage. Practitioners from New York to Paris, Moscow to Tokyo propose curating as advocacy, as atmosphere, and as architecture itself, assembling in this special thematic issue what is arguably the first compendium of contemporary practices on this emerging discourse.