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PLAT Journal

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PLAT is an independent architecture journal by @ricearch students.
Currently Editing Issue 14: Resolution

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short essay in PLAT on domesticating your environment with your stuff

thank u to the editors for their time and interest

@platjournal by @platjournal

Reflecting on our exhibition last year for Hungry Ghosts, our writing for PLAT 14: Resolution is now available on Rice Architecture’s @platjournal website.

To resolve is to determine, even if for a moment, what counts and what remains peripheral. When understood as determination rather than representation or conclusion, resolution shifts architecture away from photogenic coherence and toward experiential and tectonic negotiation, where agency can begin to register. Resolution thus emerges not as a final synthesis but as a strategic pause—a temporary alignment that resists merely looking by keeping architecture open to seeing again.

In this issue of PLAT, contributors move across these unresolved conditions surrounding resolution, attending to the built and the perceived, the material and the mediated, and reasserting the agency of perception itself. They question the regimes of representation and presentation that structure what becomes visible, and what remains underrepresented within the discipline. Taken together, these projects do not propose a single corrective, but ask after the status quo that has come to feel naturalized, the zeitgeist of the disciplinary epidermis that has emerged without deliberate choice. They search for ways to dissolve the opacity of the discipline’s boundaries as contributors or to probe them externally to examine the resolution within. by @platjournal

PLAT 14: Resolution

[Released April 23rd]

To resolve is to determine, even if for a moment, what counts and what remains peripheral. When understood as determination rather than representation or conclusion, resolution shifts architecture away from photogenic coherence and toward experiential and tectonic negotiation, where agency can begin to register. Resolution thus emerges not as a final synthesis but as a strategic pause—a temporary alignment that resists merely looking by keeping architecture open to seeing again.

In this issue of PLAT, contributors move across these unresolved conditions surrounding resolution, attending to the built and the perceived, the material and the mediated, and reasserting the agency of perception itself. They question the regimes of representation and presentation that structure what becomes visible, and what remains underrepresented within the discipline. Taken together, these projects do not propose a single corrective, but ask after the status quo that has come to feel naturalized, the zeitgeist of the disciplinary epidermis that has emerged without deliberate choice. They search for ways to dissolve the opacity of the discipline’s boundaries as contributors or to probe them externally to examine the resolution within.

For more information, visit the link in our bio. by @platjournal

PLAT Absence [Released in January 2018] In celebration of 15 years of PLAT, we take a look at some of PLAT’s previous issues. PLAT 6.0: Absence offers a moment of pause in an age of spectacle and saturation. This issue turns toward the quiet, the unseen, the unbuilt, and the rare, reclaiming absence as an active force within architectural discourse.
Rather than treating absence as a void, the issue explores it as a tool: for reflection, for reinterpretation, and for shifting our focus. Contributors examine absence across psychological, social, economic, and physical dimensions, arguing that what is missing may be just as powerful as what is present.
Through essays, speculations, and visual work, PLAT 6.0 reframes absence not as lack, but as possibility. It invites us to see again, to reimagine, and to find clarity in what is often overlooked.
What can the unseen reveal? For more information, visit the website linked in our bio! by @platjournal

PLAT Sharing
[Released in January 2019]
In celebration of 15 years of PLAT, we take a look at some of PLAT’s previous issues. PLAT 7.0: Sharing explores how emerging technologies, cultural shifts, and digital platforms are reshaping the way we share space, resources, and ideas, both online and in the built environment.
This issue embraces the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary practice, where architecture, digital media, infrastructure, and everyday life converge. Through five thematic clusters, “Sharing with Friends,” “The Ether in the Everyday,” “Imaging the Image,” “Building Sharing,” and “Make it Macro”, contributors consider how sharing manifests in everything.
Recognizing the role of platforms like Instagram in shaping today’s modes of production and dissemination, PLAT 7.0 reflects on how architecture might engage with (and transcend) the fleeting terrain of digital culture.
How can architecture participate in systems of sharing without being subsumed by them?
For more information, visit the website linked in our bio! by @platjournal

PLAT Simplicity
[Released in Fall 2019]
In celebration of 15 years of PLAT, we take a look at some of PLAT’s previous issues. PLAT 8.0: Simplicity reclaims a term long diluted by overuse. This issue looks beyond simplicity as style, and instead explores it as an attitude, one of clarity, care, and intentional restraint.

Simplicity here is not a retreat from complexity, but a means of navigating it. It is editing, omitting, and refining, not for minimalism’s sake, but to uncover what truly matters. Across essays, declarations, images, and architectures, contributors consider simplicity in digital tools, environmental urgency, historical echoes, and aesthetic choice.

At its center is a reprint of Il fera beau demain by Lacaton & Vassal, whose ethos of doing just enough, never more, embodies the kind of simplicity this issue pursues.

What if simplicity is not the absence of complexity, but a compass within it?

For more information, visit the website linked in our bio! by @platjournal

PLAT Commit
[Released in 2021]
In celebration of 15 years of PLAT, we take a look at some of PLAT’s previous issues. PLAT 9.0: Commit asks us to consider what it means to take a stance—not through monumentality or assertion, but through careful refusal, ethical clarity, and responsibility to the world around us. Inspired by Lacaton & Vassal’s quiet decision not to renovate an already beautiful square, this issue explores commitment not as a bold gesture, but as a way of operating.

This issue challenges the notion that architectural value lies in action alone. Instead, it frames commitment as an ongoing negotiation between aesthetic instinct and social responsibility—a middle path between apathy and egoism. What does it mean to act with conviction while resisting the need to embellish? To honor what already exists, rather than remake it?

The contributions within PLAT 9.0 wrestle with these questions across disciplines and perspectives. From authorship to austerity, critique to pragmatism, the issue gathers architects, educators, and theorists who together construct a multifaceted understanding of what it might mean to commit.

What does it look like to commit not to action, but to care? Not to transformation, but to attention?

For more information, visit the website linked in our bio! by @platjournal

PLAT Behold
[Released in January 2022]

In celebration of 15 years of PLAT, we take a look at some of PLAT’s previous issues. PLAT 10: Behold interrogates the commodification of architecture in a market-driven world, questioning what is lost when user experience becomes the discipline’s singular ambition.

Against the rise of consumer-oriented design, this issue reclaims architecture as a medium of meaning, not just for users, but for beholders. Beholding suggests a slower, more interpretive engagement with the built environment; one that recognizes intention, symbolism, and critical distance.

PLAT 10 brings together architects, historians, critics, and educators to explore how architecture can resist being reduced to product, how it might engage broader publics beyond its immediate users, and how it can remain a force of autonomy while grounded in the realities of social and economic systems.

How might centering the beholder allow architecture to speak again, not in service of selling, but in service of seeing?

For more information, visit the website linked in our bio! by @platjournal

PLAT Soft
[Released in January 2023]
In celebration of 15 years of PLAT, we take a look at some of PLAT’s previous issues. PLAT 11: Soft asks us to rethink the boundaries that define architecture, not only in lines and materials, but in relationships, atmospheres, and care. Against a backdrop of hard edges and rigid systems, this issue searches for softness as a design ethic: one that values reciprocity over authority, and sensitivity over permanence.
This issue investigates softness as both a material condition and a conceptual strategy, through touch and time, landscape and light, thresholds and temporality. What happens when architects choose to speak softly, attend carefully, and build with gentleness?
How can reimagining softness in architecture expand our capacity to relate, adapt, and care?
For more information, visit the website linked in our bio! by @platjournal

This Past Issue
PLAT Alchemy
[Released on January 27th, 2025]

PLAT 13: Alchemy confronts the extremes of today, climate crisis, extractive economies, and volatile technologies, by turning to architecture as a medium for transformation. In the face of uncertainty, this issue embraces an alchemical optimism: a belief that design holds the potential to alter our world.

This issue explores transformation through several different approaches, phases, and scales of how change is present in design, from systems-based thinking at a planetary scale to the individual’s perspective of the city.

How can we use the alchemical processes of architecture to transform the spaces in which we live?

For more information, visit the website linked in our bio! by @platjournal

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Learn more about our work at platjournal.com. by @platjournal

Call for Abstracts Submission deadline extended! One week left to submit your proposals by March 28.

Resolution— a firm decision, the action of solving a problem, or the level of visual detail in an image. Architecture negotiates between the clarity of drawings and the ethereal essence of a building. Architecture is interdisciplinary, but ultimately designers must take a position. PLAT 14 looks to explore not just the blurriness of architectural production, but the methodology of design.

We welcome submissions from students, architects, designers, and non-traditional voices exploring the meaning of resolution in architecture. We ask for pieces open to graphic experimentation and formatting beyond the traditional academic essay. Send abstracts or proposals of approximately 250 words to editor@platjournal.com before March 28, 2025. by @platjournal