SPLAT: Reflecting on PLAT’s History
Sarah Whiting’s Introduction to PLAT 1.0 Imposter, weighed the root of architecture and asked “what’s the gain” in crossing lines and stepping out of the discipline. In PLAT 10.5, Whiting reflects on the origins of PLAT. The journal’s longevity, she argues, is largely due to its commitment to cultivating a distinct editorial voice. In doing so, the publication has positioned itself as an unique interlocutor - a mediator at the boundary of Rice and the outside world.
Reflect–the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles is also known as the Galerie de Louis XIV–in other words: the hall of mirrors is equally known as the hall of Louis XIV, rendering the person and the architecture one and the same, ensuring that the reflections that reverberate along the 240-foot long space, bouncing from mirrors to gold and back again, would not reflect the world outside but instead the ego of the man within.
The beauty of PLAT is that it both reflects the RSA inside to itself, as well as reflecting out to the world and, finally, reflecting the world back into the school. It, too, has multiple, almost infinite reflections, but they reverberate forward, rather than reducing inward.
PLAT started just before I arrived–it was the effort of an amazing cohort of graduate students, including Melissa McDonnell (now McDonnell-Lujan, director of Project Development at the Menil), Seanna Walsh (now a Project Leader at Studio Gang), and Marti Gottsch (now a Senior Designer at SOM). There were others involved, but these three spearheaded it, and you can see that they’ve continued to leverage their architectural voices. So the big question was whether PLAT was a sustainable model. As I said to them when we were discussing the journal’s future: if it doesn’t take off, we’ll call it SPLAT and it’ll be sunsetted!” I agreed that the school would support it as an independent, student-run publication, but I urged them to make one significant change: rather than publish anything that came in, which was their original intent, I asked them to take editorial stances. Theming permits them to structure each issue, reflecting the editors’ interests, positions, ideas, hopes, and desires.
There are no SPLATS to be found. It’s been simply amazing watching the journal’s success. The world is in a dark place right now–environmentally, economically, politically–but PLAT’s reflection of our future gives me hope.
