Call for Submissions: PLAT 1.5_Mind the Gap

PLAT Journal is produced by students at the Rice School of Architecture.

We are accepting submissions (projects, photographs, drawings, prints, media projects, essays) for our forthcoming issue, PLAT 1.5.

PLAT 1.5: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
MIND THE GAP

The distance between architectural representation and the built environment is closing. New building technologies and representational tools as well as the accumulation of economic and political capital conspire to erode the friction between them.

Two lines on a piece of paper are not a wall. Drawing conventions are symbols that require interpretation. We have always relied on the intelligibility of these notations in order to operate. Today, however, technologies remove the need for translation; mass-customized parts go from the 3D model or database to the mill to the site without being drawn in a plan or section. Emerging superpowers are able to create buildings which push the boundaries of economic and structural feasibility; entire islands are created, landscaped, and urbanized in less than a lifetime. In a time when even the most fantastical drawings can be realized as architecture, it is easy to ignore the gap between representation and building.

Yet the interrogation of this gap has been critical for the advancement of architecture. Libeskind’s drawings and Hadid’s paintings problematized and destabilized the representation of architectural space. Archigram’s transcendence of their political and economic circumstances through drawing opened new territory for the discourse. The ascendancy of new forms of representation (the diagram, the map, the cartoon, the rendering, animation, etc.) provokes different interrogations and explorations. PLAT 1.5 invites the submission of images, essays, projects, and manifestos that MIND THE GAP.

Please visit our website, www.platjournal.com for more information and submissions guidelines. Submit abstracts to [email protected] by 2/14/2011 for consideration.