The distance between architectural representation and the built environment is closing. New building technologies and representational tools as well as the accumulation of economic and political capital conspire to erode the friction between them.
Two lines on a piece of paper are not a wall. Drawing conventions are symbols that require interpretation. We have always relied on the intelligibility of these notations in order to operate. Today, however, technologies remove the need for translation; mass-customized parts go from the 3D model or database to the mill to the site without being drawn in a plan or section. Emerging superpowers are able to create buildings which push the boundaries of economic and structural feasibility; entire islands are created, landscaped, and urbanized in less than a lifetime. In a time when even the most fantastical drawings can be realized as architecture, it is easy to ignore the gap between representation and building.
Yet the interrogation of this gap has been critical for the advancement of architecture. Libeskind’s drawings and Hadid’s paintings problematized and destabilized the representation of architectural space. Archigram’s transcendence of their political and economic circumstances through drawing opened new territory for the discourse. The ascendancy of new forms of representation (the diagram, the map, the cartoon, the rendering, animation, etc.) provokes different interrogations and explorations. PLAT 1.5 invites the submission of images, essays, projects, and manifestos that MIND THE GAP.
NEW DEADLINE
February 14, 2011
TO BE CONSIDERED FOR PLAT 1.5
Please submit an abstract and (if applicable) images by February 14, 2011. Submissions should be in American English and formatted in the Chicago Manual of Style with all sources clearly documented. Images should be a JPEG, 2 MB or smaller. Authors should have high-resolution, publication-quality images available if selected. All authors must have rights or permissions for all images submitted before final publication. Any questions should be sent to editor@platjournal.com.