The content of PLATFORM falls into eight types of essays that highlight and address a range of issues about buildings, spaces, and landscapes:
Conversations is the place for interviews and oral histories. It’s where we hear from architects, historians, urbanists, activists, and others, in their own words. This is where we are introduced to a young artist or an established practitioner; where scholars debate, disagree, and challenge each other; and where we learn about the process of making, documenting, and writing about the built environment.
Length: 500-1,500 words
Finding is where you share new thoughts on research and research findings. You know the feeling: you have made this amazing discovery in the field that might change the way we think about African diasporic architectural history; or looking through reams of dusty correspondence you have unexpectedly found a drawing enclosed with one of the letters. Now you want to share your thoughts on these finds with someone, hoping it will open up a new prospect in seeing a landscape, or it will open up a new research project for you or someone else. Or perhaps after years of thinking about how to tackle a set of disparate archival documents or find a sweet space between digital and analogue drawings you have figured out a method to address the problem.
This is the place to write about how we encounter evidence and how we weave evidence into narrative. Or how we foster conversations about the craft of writing about space, material culture and the built environment. A submission may focus on a specific document, image, film, recording, interview, or story, or it may be speculative.
Length: 500-1,000 words
House Histories explore where we live, how we live, and with whom we live. We want to learn what you know about apartment buildings, dorm rooms, homeless shelters, single-family houses, hotels, public housing, and the many other places where people lived historically and in the present day. We welcome essays that investigate what it means to dwell, considering emotions, memories, power, loss, and embodied experiences (sight, touch, smell, sound). What makes a house, an everyday building, into a place that someone calls home? We also invite essays that address the contemporary crisis in affordable housing and speculate on political, economic, and design solutions.
Length: 500-1,000 words
Opinion is the place to take a stand on a range of urgent problems and ideas, from the surveillance state to the institutionalization of children and ethnic minorities, and tie these discussions to buildings, spaces, and landscapes.Is something making headlines that your research — new or old, on subjects contemporary or historical — can shed light on? Do you want to take a position on an issue in the news through the lens of a specific building or place, past or present? Submit a one-off, timely piece. Interested in publishing regular commentary reflecting on architecture, society, and politics? Become a featured columnist.
Length: 1,000-3,000 words
Photoessays present original or in certain cases archival photographs in a visually forward arrangements, typically with images grouped in a grid, each with a rich caption. Essays are accompanies by a short text introducing the set of photographs.
Length: 12 -24 photographs, 500-1,000 words
We want to learn about that exciting article, book, or edited volume that you are reading now. Maybe it’s a podcast you think more people should know about. Maybe it’s a movie. Maybe it’s a startling use of data visualization. Share short descriptions of the work with notes about why you find it useful or interesting and how it would help platform’s readers think through questions of space, architecture, and the built environment, even if it addresses none of them in particular. We would like to hear about recent works, but revisiting classics with a new interpretive lens is welcome as well.
These entries in Reading/Listening/Watching are not traditional reviews of books, media, or exhibitions; they offer more information than an annotated bibliography or an publisher's description. Tell us why you find this material interesting or engaging. Your remarks or contribution may contain a discussion of the main argument or one particular aspect of the work, or how it helps you think through a course, your research or design in terms of methods and theory. Would it make a good seminar reading? Is it a good intro-level book? Could it be watched in class? Does it make ingenious or creative use of evidence? Does it introduce a new way of seeing a problem in research or design? Is it an underexplored subject?
Length: 500-1,000 words
Specifying is the place for you to write about what we build, how we build, and who builds the places that we inhabit every day. Are you an architect or a builder who wants to bridge the schism between research, design, and construction? Or are you a historian who is eager to share your knowledge about labor and technology, and learn more about digital fabrication in the present day? Do you want to take a hard look at the causes of structural failure and fires in buildings and the attendant loss of life? Do you love combing through the drawers in hardware stores, looking for the perfect fastener? Specifying is the place to discuss the multi-faceted practices that adhere to building and builders—specifying, constructing, regulating, spec-writing, construction managing—and to assess the relationship of these aspects of the material world to past practices, labor, technology and other social/political issues.
Length: 500-1,000 words.
Speculations presents provocative unbuilt design projects that contribute to public understanding of contemporary issues.
Length: 500-1,000 words.
Academic labor has changed fundamentally in the last two decades. Teaching/Working is dedicated to teaching and current realities of working in academia. We welcome articles about issues related to tenure, adjunct and graduate student union organizations, enrollment issues, changes in visa and travel regulations, research funding, and changing job opportunities. We are also interested in discussing innovative methods of pedagogy in architecture schools, departments of geography, art and architecture history, urban studies, and related fields. Teaching also reports on conditions in colleges and universities. This section exposes PLATFORM’s readers to new methods that they can use in their own teaching and lets readers know that they are not alone. Often working in isolation or in small cohorts, we all struggle to give our students the best education possible, despite the lack of funding, classroom technology, and appropriate classroom space. Posts on teaching methods used in studio and in traditional classroom settings are welcome.
Length: 500-1,000 words