PLAT 2.0 Call For Submissions

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.

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?

PLAT 2.0 will illuminate 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.

For full submission details please refer to our website PLATjouranl.com.