Platform: A Digital Forum for Conversations About the Built Environment

London has a serious housing shortage — but is running out of space to add homes. Since the 1980s, growth has been channeled into centrally located post-industrial sites. Today much of that land is built up. Outside the city, construction is limited by the Green Belt. Now, some are calling for a revival of the postwar New Towns program, or even building on the Green Belt. In “What Are Suburbs For? Paving Paradise in London,” Jon Tabbush explores a promising third option: transforming older suburbs through infill. It’s already having an impact in some areas, but will it be enough to solve the crisis?

Click on the link below to read more.

PLATFORM: What Are Suburbs For? Paving Paradise in London Some years ago, a family in the North London suburb of North Finchley had their door knocked by a man offering them a large sum of free money. The proposal was simple. Many houses on the street had double-length gardens with space for another house but didn’t have planning permission for anything

What does reparative scholarship look like? Today’s post, “Pulling Closer: Caregiving as Method, Part 2” records a conversation among six scholars on the relationships among repair, intimacy, and scholarship. This article documents the discussion at the second of three workshops, hosted by the Society for Architectural Historians in 2021, on the role of caregiving in architecture. The questions animating the workshop were made especially timely by the pandemic but are, in many ways, ordinary engagements with questions of survival and support in contexts of social inequality. In this second panel, scholars Lilian Chee, Delia Duong Ba Wendel, and Jay Cephas reflect on a question posed by moderator Ana Miljacki: what kinds of narratives are produced when repair and intimacy are the historian’s major concerns? Other themes discussed include the power of images, the role of personal experience in scholarship, and changing understandings of the archive.

Click on the link below to read more.

PLATFORM: Pulling Closer: Caregiving as Method, Part 2 This article is the second in a three-part series. Click here to read part 1. In 2021, the Society of Architectural Historians hosted the workshop Caregiving as Method to explore the role of caregiving in architecture. It was organized by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi of Barnard College with co

How is care related to time? Today’s post, “Pulling Closer: Caregiving as Method, Part 1,” documents a conversation among six scholars on the relationships among care, historical scholarship, and community. The article records the discussion at the first of three workshops, hosted by the Society for Architectural Historians in 2021, on the role of caregiving in architecture. The questions animating the workshop were made especially timely by the pandemic but are, in many ways, ordinary engagements with questions of survival and support in contexts of social inequality. In this panel, scholars Itohan Osayimwese, Kush Patel, and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi reflect on a question posed by moderator Garnette Cadogan: what does it mean to think of care as a way of pulling “something” closer, or pulling others closer to you? Themes touched on in this discussion include alternative understandings of time, care webs, the post-custodial archive, and vulnerability.

Click on the link below to read more.

PLATFORM: Pulling Closer: Caregiving as Method, Part 1 In 2021, the Society of Architectural Historians hosted the workshop Caregiving as Method to explore the role of caregiving in architecture. It was organized by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi of Barnard College with contributions from Jay Cephas , Lilian Chee , Elis Mendoza , Ikem Stanley Okoye , I

In view of the loss of lives and wholesale destruction of places in the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict, PLATFORM reissues four previously published articles to consider how we might understand the magnitude of harm and how might architectural traces and war debris bear the burden of testimony: Adi Meyerovitch, “Kabri Aqueduct: A Neutralized Monument,” published on July 26, 2021; Arpan Roy, “Islamic Pasts and Futures in Palestine,” published on October 25, 2021; Mahdi Sabbagh, “Dispossession and Resistance in the City of Acre,” published on May 2, 2022; and Elad Horn, "The Three Sins of the Central Station and the Future of Big Concrete Buildings," published on August 21, 2023.

Click on the link below to read more.

PLATFORM: The Debris of War This week we reflect on the loss of lives and the wholesale destruction of places that are victims of the Israel-Gaza conflict. The bombardment of Gaza and escalation of armed action in the West Bank by the Israeli military, following Hamas’s attack on military and civilian centers in southern Isr...

Mizik hip-hòp pa soti sèlman nan Bwonks; se sa Milande Joseph vle fè nou konnen nan « Hip-hòp transnasyonal : yon ti reflè peyi Dayiti ». Nan tèks sila, Joseph fè yon voye je gade plizyè kominote nwa nan Amerik di Nò a kote stil mizik sa a gen rasin li; youn nan espas li mete gwo aksan sou li se mouvman hip-hòp « RapQuéb » la nan Monreyal, nan Kebèk. Anndan Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension (VSP), yon anklav etnik ki te gen yon majorite ayisyen k ap viv ladann, atis rap yo te chwazi itilize mizik, videyo ak fotografi pou fè fas kare ak gwo pwoblèm ibanis ak mank bon jan politik pou jesyon kominote a. Lè yo te deside kreye zèv atistik tout moun ka wè ki dokimante ak pale sou pwoblèm ibanis nan zòn kote nwa y ap viv, mouvman transnasyonal « RapQuéb » la te chwazi montre pwoblèm k ap ravaje kominote a pandan l ap goumen kont yo.

Klike sou lyen an pou w li plis.

PLATFORM: Aspè Transnasyonal Mizik Hip-Hòp: Yon Ti Reflè Peyi Dayiti Atik sa a tou pibliye an angle ak franse . Chwa 11 dawout 1793 la kòm dat nesans mizik hip-hòp la pa fin kòrèk. Lè mwen di sa, pa konprann m ap chache diminye siksè atistik DJ Kool Herc oswa enpòtans gwo sware li te òganize jou sila nan Sid Bronks lan genyen. Lide a se pito atire

Le hip-hop n'est pas né uniquement dans le Bronx affirme Sophonie Milande Joseph dans son texte « Hip-hop transnational : reflets d’Haïti ». Joseph attire l'attention sur les origines du genre au sein de plusieurs communautés noires nord-américaines, en se concentrant ici en particulier sur la scène hip-hop « RapQuéb » à Montréal, Québec. À Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension (VSP), une enclave ethnique majoritairement haïtienne, les artistes rap ont utilisé la musique, la vidéo et la photographie pour lutter contre des problèmes difficiles d’urbanisme et de politiques adéquates. En créant un art public qui enregistre et diffuse les expériences de l'urbanisme noir, la culture hip-hop transnationale de RapQuéb s'attaque à ces difficultés communautaires et révèle les luttes qui y sont liées.

Cliquez sur le lien pour en savoir plus.

PLATFORM: Hip-Hop Transnational: Reflets d’Haïti Cet article est également publié en anglais   et en créole haïtien . Considérer le 11 août 1973 comme la date de naissance du hip-hop est inexact. Je ne prétends pas par là diminuer le succès artistique de DJ Kool Herc lors de la légendaire soirée qu’il a organisée ce jour-là

Hip-hop was not born solely in the Bronx, argues Sophonie Milande Joseph in “Transnational Hip-Hop: Reflections of Haiti.” Joseph draws attention to the genre’s origins within multiple Black North American communities, here focusing in particular on the “RapQuéb” hip-hop scene in Montréal, Quebec. In Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension (VSP), a largely Haitian ethnic enclave, rap artists have used music, video, and photography to wrestle with difficult planning and policy issues. By creating public art that records and broadcasts Black Urbanism experiences, RapQuéb’s transnational hip-hop culture grapples with, and broadcasts, these community struggles.

Click on the link below to read more. You can also read this post in French or Haitian Creole!

PLATFORM: Transnational Hip-Hop: Reflections of Haiti This article is also published in French and Haitian Creole . August 11, 1973 is not hip-hop’s date of birth . I don’t make this claim to diminish DJ Kool Herc’s artistic achievement at the legendary party he hosted that day in the South Bronx. Rather, my aim is to draw attention to hi

In “Settling in the Scars of the City,” Ben Jameson-Ellsmore examines the environmental history of the land claimed by the unhoused in Oakland, California. He finds that 20th-century landscapes of racialized dispossession and segregation — through redlining, slum clearance, and freeway construction — are contiguous with today’s geographies of encampment. The recent eviction of an encampment beneath a freeway on grounds of protecting public health echoes the demolition of West Oakland neighborhoods in the 1960s to stymie the spread of urban “blight.”

Click on the link below to read more.

PLATFORM: Settling in the Scars of the City While embedded with Alameda County (Calif.) Vector [pest] Control this summer, I visited six homeless encampments in Oakland in various states of cohesion and dispersion. My research was for the United States’ Historic American Buildings Survey as a part of an initiative to document and record t

Studying architectural history builds valuable career skills but it is often difficult to get students understand this. How can educators change this perception? In “Community Partners in the Classroom,” Jessica Mace champions organization-partnered projects as a promising solution. Demonstrating a case study at the University of Toronto in which students worked with the Ontario Heritage Trust, Mace explores just how much undergraduates can benefit from “real-world” projects and experiential learning.

Click on the link below to read more!

PLATFORM: Community Partners in the Classroom The real world. As educators, we often talk about preparing students for the “real world.” While the purpose of a university education in the liberal arts is not to feed directly into this or that career, we do need to consider the skills that students develop in the classroom. The formula of le...

Germany takes pride in its culture of remembrance. But what happens when memorials are so subtle that many passersby miss them? In “Memory In the Closet? Q***r Memory After National Socialism,” Simone Stirner discusses the invisibility of three sites dedicated to q***r histories: the Memorials to Homosexuals Persecuted under Na**sm in Berlin and Munich, and the AIDS-column in Munich. Stirner considers the stakes of q***r visibility against the backdrop of LGBTIQ* life in Germany in the mid-20th century and today. Ultimately, she argues, q***r memorials must offer more than perfunctory displays of “openness and tolerance” — without falling back on the static and patriarchal logic of traditional monuments.

Click on the link below to read more.
***r ***rrights

PLATFORM: Memory in the Closet? Q***r Memorials After National Socialism Munich’s “Memorial for Le****ns and G**s Persecuted under National Socialism” is a roughly 750 square feet ground installation made of pastel rainbow-colored stones at the former location of Schwarzfischer , a gay bar where a raid on October 20th, 1934, marked the start of the persecution of L...

In “Abstraction Lies: Political Dissonance and Brasilia’s Miniature Worlds,” whose publication falls on Indigenous Peoples' Day in the U.S., Alice Heeren explores the powerful role that architectural miniatures play in constructing political narratives. She juxtaposes the work of Brazilian artist Laercio Redondo with photographs of attacks by a far-right mob on the Praça dos Três Poderes in Brasilia, showing that they represent two very different conceptions of the capital's history. In the 1950s, Brazil’s government distributed propaganda about Brasilia across the world, using architectural models to represent the new city as an utopia, while eliding other motives for its construction, including subjugation of indigenous peoples. Redondo, also using a model, subverts this propaganda while acknowledging its symbolic power. Though abstractions, architectural miniatures reflect the materialization of values in the world.

Click on the link below to read more.

PLATFORM: Abstraction Lies: Political Dissonance and Brasília’s Miniature Worlds For his 2015 video installation Abstraction Lies , Brazilian artist Laercio Redondo used Bauhaus-style wooden toy blocks to create a miniature replica of the Congresso Nacional in Brasília (Figure 1). Designed by Oscar Niemeyer , the building sits at the pinnacle of the monumental axis of Braz

This past June, Britain’s Eden Project began pumping heat from a new geothermal well into its iconic domes. Why, two decades after opening, did this self-described “living theatre of plants and people” introduce this deep earth energy system? More curiously, why did it not integrate the facility, spatially and aesthetically, with its gardens and greenhouses? By not doing so, argues David Salomon in “Caring for Heat: Re-presenting Geothermal Energy at the Eden Project,” Eden lost an opportunity to reveal the site’s, and the culture’s, fraught relationship with the latent energy that lies beneath the Earth’s surface.

Click on the link below to read more.

, , , , , , , , , ,

PLATFORM: Caring for Heat: Re-presenting Geothermal Energy at the Eden Project This past June, Eden Project began pumping heat from a new geothermal well into its iconic domes. Located in Cornwall, England, Eden is the well-known, well-attended, self-described “living theatre of plants and people.” Its twenty acres of outdoor gardens are populated with two thousand varieti...

To know architecture, it’s often said, is to experience it — personally. But with old canons out and global perspectives in, historians have embraced new epistemologies. Still, travel has much to teach. In “Walking as a Form of Architectural Learning: A Stroll Through Quito, Ecuador,” Jennifer Hock reflects on a summer vacation in the Central American capital where, as she explored, she pondered the question of what being somewhere reveals that mediation obscures. What, ultimately, do we learn from being somewhere?

Click on the link below to read more.

PLATFORM: Walking as a Form of Architectural Learning: A Stroll Through Quito, Ecuador When I was in college in a small American city almost thirty years ago, one of my art history professors declared that he lectured as often as he could about buildings that he had visited in person. “Being there,” he said, “is essential.” I was, at the time, deeply impressed. I was twenty; I...

Critics and fans of the summer blockbuster Barbie have reveled in its wit and wisdom, music and choreography, costumes and sets, and launched a thousand think pieces scrutinizing its cinematic references, technical achievements, and the question of whether, after 64 years, the culture is ready to make peace with Mattel’s doll. In “Historians in Barbieland,” Alice T. Friedman, Despina Stratigakos, and PLATFORM’s Matthew Gordon Lasner react to the film and reflect on the real-life houses that inspired it, why Ken could never be an architect, and Barbie’s right to the city.

Click on the link below to read more.

PLATFORM: Historians in Barbieland Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has entranced movie-goers around the world. Critics and fans have reveled in its wit and wisdom, music and choreography, costumes and sets, and launched a thousand think pieces scrutinizing its cinematic references, technical achievements, and the question of whether, after s

How should a country commemorate a traumatic political event? Valentina Rozas-Krause grapples with this question in her piece "The Political is Personal: 50 Years after the Coup D'Ètat in Chile." This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the American-backed coup that brought down socialist president Salvador Allende and replaced him with dictator Augusto Pinochet. Santiago, the nation's capital, has planned a series of commemorative events in three public buildings--the presidential palace, the national stadium, and the Gabriela Mistral cultural center--within which much of the coup and the ensuing political takeover took place. Yet, Rozas-Krause warns, voices of denial and revisionism have gained traction in recent years, indicating a fraught memorial landscape. Why, she wonders, memorialize the coup when there is little consensus on its cultural, emotional, and political reverberations? Nevertheless, she is heartened by grassroots efforts across the country to host "microevents" that preserve and carry forward memories of the dictatorship.

Click on the link below to read more.

PLATFORM: The Political is Personal: 50 Years After the Coup d'Etat in Chile I am four months older than the Chilean president Gabriel Boric (2022-), and about the same age as half of his cabinet. We were all born under the civic-military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), but we were young enough not to remember most of it. Instead, we carry second-generation mem