PLATFORM: Five Years of PLATFORM

Today is PLATFORM’s fifth anniversary. After more than a year of planning, we launched on June 24, 2019 with our first five articles. Our aim was to run the site for one year as an experiment. Was there an audience for new kinds of content (global, multidisciplinary, timely), in a new format (short-form), written in an accessible way (rather than for specialists)? Would historians and social scientists, practitioners and critics be eager and willing to write for the general public? It turned out there was, and there were. And after that breakneck first year, we forged ahead publishing one or two articles most weeks since, now more than three hundred and counting.

Since that inaugural before COVID-19 we’ve made some changes at PLATFORM. Kishwar Rizvi (one of our first authors) and Fernando Luis Lara joined our team as Acquisitions Editors (who, like our other editors, also serve six-month terms as Production Editor on a rotating basis), while founding co-editor Marta Gutman, whose energy brought us much of our early momentum, shifted to Editor Emeritus last year, after she was appointed dean of the Spitzer School of Architecture at City College. Gauri Bharat, Min Kyung Lee, Sarah Lynn Lopez, Andrew Shanken, and Mira Waits (now cycled off) joined us as Contributing Editors.

Along the way, we continued to publish in the five sections, or “verticals,” that we began with — Finding (about research), Opinion, Reading/Watching/Listening, Specifying (about design practice), and Teaching/Working (pedagogy and labor) — while adding five more: Conversations, Editorials, House Histories, Photoessays, and, earlier this year, Speculations (unbuilt designs). We also continued to publish articles in languages other than English (alongside English translations), and expanded the number of languages to include Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Haitian Creole, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Urdu. Doing so allowed us to communicate with audiences who otherwise would never have been within our reach.

As we mark this five-year milestone, we are celebrating by taking stock of our most-read articles (see below for list of top three articles by number of page-views for each year). The breadth in topics and geography of this content — which represents less than 5% of what we’ve published — underscores two of the aspects of PLATFORM that we believe make it special. So does the range of writers. The plurality of contributors to PLATFORM have been professional historians of art and architecture. But PLATFORM authors are nothing if not diverse. The list below includes professors of (and PhD students in) architecture, architectural history, art history, landscape architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, anthropology, history, public health, journalism, and English, as well as critics, curators, and practicing designers. Our full list of authors also includes sociologists, professional photographers, and more, and ranges in age and experience from undergraduates to professors emeritus. We are grateful to them for choosing to publish in PLATFORM, and to you for reading their content — not to mention our digital and production assistants, Sana Al-Naimi (past) and Giuliana Vaccarino Gearty (present). Thank you.

Year 1

#1 Thaisa Way, "Why History for Designers? (Part 1)" (Mar. 2020). Here, Way argues that design educators need to engage their students in history as a method of inquiry — a particularly pressing issue for landscape designers who will shape sites rich with multiple histories that are “remembered and forgotten, both acknowledged and erased.”

Figure 1. This sign at Point Comfort/Fort Monroe, Virginia, marks where the first Africans arrived in the English colonies that would later become the United States. Photograph by DrStew82, 2014, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

#2 Abigail A. Van Slyck, "The Power of the Plan" (Jan. 2020)

#3 Meredith Martin & Gillian Weiss, "The Art of Plague and Panic: Marseille, 1720" (Apr. 2020)

Year 2

#1 Fernando Luiz Lara, "Abstraction is a Privilege" (June 2021). In this article, Lara posits that abstraction, a core component of design developed in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, is a product of efforts to colonize the Americas — to control space and resources in part by denying local and "relational" knowledge.

Figure 2. Map of Tenochtitlan and Gulf of Mexico, attributed to Fredrich Peypus, 1524. Courtesy of Newberry Library via Wikimedia Commons.

#2 Mohamed Elshahed, "Demolitions and the Urgency of Architectural History in Egypt" (Sept. 2020)

#3 Reem Khorshid, "Experiencing the Sounds and Silences of Cairo" (Oct. 2020)

Year 3

#1 Lisa Goff, "Under Cover: Clandestine Removals of Confederate Statues" (Sept. 2021). After the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia, Goff called for daylighting the dismantling of Confederate monuments, much of which was happening under the cover of night — ostensibly to protect activists and city officials from harassment by white supremacists, but which, in fact, protected white supremacists from inconvenient truths.

Figure 3. Stonewall Jackson statue removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, on July 1, 2020. Photograph by Zach Clarke.

#2 Todd Michney & LaDale Winling, "How Academia Laid the Groundwork for Redlining" (Nov. 2021)

#3 Bryan E. Norwood, "Whiteness and the Architectural Profession in the United States" (Sept. 2020)

Year 4

Figure 4. The Community Women’s Center of Philadelphia, a crisis pregnancy center. Photograph by M.C. Overholt, June 2022.

#1 M. C. Overholt, "Lessons from the Crisis Pregnancy Center: Anti-abortion Activism and the Architecture of Coercion" (June 2022). This article, published the day the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, examined the strategic positioning of crisis pregnancy centers near U.S. abortion clinics, their shared interior compositions, and their tactics for eliciting support.

#2 Keelan Overton, "Framing, Performing, Forgetting: The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin" (Sept. 2022)

#3 Annemarie Sammartino, "Rethinking Co-op City, White Flight, and Race" (Dec. 2022)

Year 5

#1 Alice T. Friedman, Despina Stratigakos, & Matthew Gordon Lasner, "Historians in Barbieland" (Sept. 2023). In this trio of mini-articles, three historians offered hot takes on the summer blockbuster Barbie, reflecting on the real-life houses that inspired the film’s sets, why Ken could never be an architect, and Barbie’s right to the city.