PLATFORM is an open digital venue for exchanging new ideas about working with, researching, teaching, and writing about buildings, spaces, and landscapes. We feature content that engages with contemporary culture and politics. PLATFORM publishes timely short pieces: it is not a journal, it is a not a book, there is no print version. It is a moderated platform for speaking to diverse audiences, for thinking critically, and for taking a stand.
PLATFORM is broad in perspective and interdisciplinary in orientation. PLATFORM invites contributors from the global north and south and from across professions and disciplines. We are not a closed or finite group. Unsolicited work is welcome. You do not need to have gone to school with the editors, be an architect, an architectural historian, or an academic to join the conversation. We value the diversity of opinions about how we view, read, experience, and engage with the built and natural landscapes. PLATFORM crosses disciplinary divides and is explicitly international—see who we are and what we publish.
PLATFORM facilitates dialog about spaces: contemporary and historical. We publish short-form essays and digital content (audio, photos, video, and data visualization). We are keen to publish cutting-edge discussions about the here and now, and how we relate to the past, to history, and our legacies at the present moment.
PLATFORM is not peer-reviewed in the conventional, double-blind sense. PLATFORM selects submissions on the basis of quality, originality, and tone—in particular, writing that is rigorous but accessible, and unhampered by academic prose or jargon. (For more on tone, see PLATFORM’s writing credo on our Submissions Guidelines page) Every PLATFORM article does, however, undergo a process of developmental editing with one of our editors or contributing editors (in some cases two depending on the area of inquiry and our own expertise).
The editors know who the authors are, and vice versa. Yet the experience we editors bring to our work—including as editors or reviews-editors of leading journals in our fields, including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and Buildings & Landscapes—means that we are often doing the same work we would do were we anonymous and, we believe, just as well.
Peer-review evolved to ensure standards of scholarly rigor. Blind peer-review is premised on the idea that this form of reading minimizes bias and that only when protected by the cloak of anonymity will reviewers provide an impartial opinion on the scholarly merits of the work: the paper’s evidence, the author’s awareness of the state of the field, and ability to make an original argument, among other matters. In the humanities, the blindness of peer-review is useful for maintaining scholarly standards that may include argumentation based on archival and field research or a deep sense of the discipline’s genealogy.
Yet this form of review isn’t always appropriate. Just as paradigmatic shifts in science are made difficult by entrenched ways of disciplinary thinking embodied in double-bind peer review, in the humanities anonymous review can be ineffective as a tool for expanding a field or promoting creative thinking. Additionally, the review process and length of time needed to see an article or book from submission to publication can be cumbersome. The necessary slowness of the process cannot be responsive to rapidly developing events, nor can it accommodate the need, particularly among junior scholars, to communicate ideas about research, teaching, reading, and practice in a timely manner.
At PLATFORM we have created an alternative model that suits the kind of writing we aim to publish. Our articles still undergo review, but in a manner that is open and transparent. We operate on the premise of empathetic critical reading.
After publication, PLATFORM essays are open to comments, which are lightly moderated to ensure no inappropriate posts are made, i.e. insults, ad hominem attacks, spam ads, or that violate our Terms of Service.