About PLAT

PLAT's purpose is to shift architectural discourse by stimulating new relationships between design, production, and theory. It operates by interweaving student, faculty, and professional work into an open and evolving dialogue which progresses from issue to issue. Curating worldwide submissions in two annual issues, PLAT serves as a projective catalyst for architectural discourse.

PLAT is an independent Architectural Journal published by students at Rice School of Architecture.

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PLAT EDITORIAL BOARD

Editors-In-Chief
Issues 2.5/3.0
Mary Casper
Chimaobi Izeogu

Managing Editor
Sean Billy Kizy

Graphic Editor
Varia Smirnova

Finance Director
Alex Tehranian

Grants Director
Brianna Rogers

Communications Director
Sam Biroscak

Distribution Director
Sheila Mednick

Web Director
Chris Duffel

Outgoing Editors
Issues 1.5/2.0
Editors-In-Chief
Joseph Scherer
Eileen Witte

Managing Editor
Erin Baer

CONTACT US

We’d love to hear from you!
editor@platjournal.com
donations@platjournal.com
publication@platjournal.com

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The only place you will ever see us write less than 160 characters.
@PLATjournal

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Mailing Address

PLAT Journal   
Rice School of Architecture   
MS-50 PO Box 1892
Houston TX 77251-1892 USA   
PLATjournal.com

PLAT Resellers

Brazos Bookstore
MFAH
Menil Collection
DOMY
Marfa Bookstore
Van Alen Books

PLAT 2.5 currently under production slated for Fall 2012 release.

Issues of PLAT are circling the globe in the Archizines exhibit Founded and Curated by Elias Redstone. http://www.archizines.com/

If you missed the launch party for PLAT 2.0 check out pictures of the event on our Facebook page.

In the call for submissions for PLAT 1.5 we began with a disquieting provocation: what is at stake in the disappearing gap between architectural representation and the buildings it produces? The content we received demonstrated representation’s capacity to transcend its assumed role as a tool for building. But it also revealed another discontinuity, one inherent to representation, which technology cannot close. The various translation processes that are fundamental to architectural representation engender the double discontinuity of gaps and excesses, shortfalls and overlaps. Ideas and agendas never emerge fully intact when drawn, but—equally—the implications of a drawing always exceed this intent. (Published Spring 2012)

 

PLAT 2.0 illuminates the cultural, political, and social milieu in which architecture operates, as well as the agendas it pursues, through critical analysis and playful subversion of the potentials and limits of representation.

The essays, projects, and interviews collected in "PLAT 1.5: Mind the Gap" comprise the first volume of a two-part investigation into the current state of architectural representation. In this issue, we explore this territory in an effort to uncover new insights into the relationship between technology and design processes. The evolution of our tools and techniques changes not only how we draw, but what we draw, and this impact demands critical assessment. As designers, how do we engage these developments? How can we take advantage of these contemporary reconfigurations, and to what degree should we remain suspicious? (Published Fall 2011)

 

 

This acknowledgement prompts reconsideration of the context and subtext of representation. For example, when the plan, section, and detail are released from their role as documents for producing a building, to what new agendas do they find themselves accomplice? What are the subjective biases inherent in the process of selecting and organizing data into infographics or maps? How do the conventions of the contemporary diagram obscure or emphasize its narrative implications? What does the rhetoric of a rendering—the affect, atmosphere, and lifestyles it describes—suggest about the changing relationship between architecture and its public?

The first full issue of PLAT is a survey of characters, practices, and conditions of the Impostor in architecture. Through essays, projects, drawings and interviews, PLAT 1.0 interrogates notions of real and fake, putting forth an interpretation of architecture's tendency toward interdisciplinarity. PLAT brings the work of the Rice School of Architecture together with a broad range of faculty, students and practitioners throughout the world. (Published Fall 2010)

 

 

The impostor is most conventionally a character—one who passes herself off as someone other than she really is. As a collection of works, PLAT 1.0 traces the impostor through its manifestations from character to practice. This topic generates a stage for not only the characters that deceive us, but also for the architecture that dupes us. What is it about the character of impostor that applies to architecture, both in practice and in form? Behind the impostor’s artful disguise is a space of innovation. The elegant crimes of the impostor can serve as provocations for architecture, moving the discipline beyond the boundaries of convention.

PLAT 1.0 invites you to stop worrying and learn to love the Impostor.

The inaugural issue of PLAT set out to establish a publication that could be at once rigorous and loose. As a platform for the students of Rice University, PLAT 0.5 is a recombination of work 'from the margins' of architectural projects, born from a desire to crystallize salient but oft forgotten moments in our lives and labors as architecture students. The title was chosen for its implications of framing territory: to plat a neighborhood is common practice even today in the vast spaces of Texas, and to us this was fascinating. (Published Spring 2010)

 

 (Limited Availability)

 

When you're in completely foreign territory, the rules change, and so do the relationships between things. Borrowing from the Dadaist technique of defamiliarization, PLAT 0.5 took advantage of the many meanings of its title to imagine new territories for conceiving of architectural discourse. Rather than rehearsing conversations of infrastructural, ecological, scalar and performative issues, PLAT 0.5 situated representations of varied conditions – architecture, infrastructures, ecologies, regions and cultures themselves – adjacent to one another, letting the relationships between them instigate a discussion on agency and performativity. Priveleging presence over analysis, PLAT 0.5 framed its own parcel within the vastness of the architectural discipline.