PLAT Journal

PLAT Simplicity
[Released in January 2020]
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!

PLAT 10 launches tomorrow!

On the occasion of the release of 10 , PLAT journal presents a panel discussion with contributors: Mario Carpo, The Bartlett School of Architecture; Todd Cronan, Emory University; Daniel Jacobs & Brittany Utting, HOME-OFFICE/University of Houston and Rice University; and Gili Merin, The Architectural Association, at 12:00 p.m. cst via Zoom (link in bio) as part of the 2021-2022 Rice Architecture Lecture Series, Building Identities, Fall Edition.

Hot off the press and soon to be in your hands!

On the occasion of the release of 10 Behold, PLAT journal presents a panel discussion with contributors: Mario Carpo, The Bartlett School of Architecture; Todd Cronan, Emory University; Daniel Jacobs & Brittany Utting, HOME-OFFICE/University of Houston and Rice University; and Gili Merin, The Architectural Association, at 12:00 p.m. cst via Zoom (link in bio) as part of the 2021-2022 Rice Architecture Lecture Series, Building Identities, Fall Edition.

This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and the George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund, the William B. Coleman Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture, the Wm. W. Caudill Lecture Series Fund, and Rice Design Alliance (RDA), the public programs and outreach arm of Rice Architecture. PLAT is an independent student journal of Rice Architecture and is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts ().

Poster artwork by Curtis Roth (.Curtis).

PLAT 9.5 Leave Space is out starting this week, on a rolling release. We are happy to launch the first half of the issue today, featuring conversations with Marcelo López-Dinardi, Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim, Nader Tehrani, Jean Jaminet and T+E+A+M, and Jesús Vassallo. The first five articles are available at www.platjournal.com/ninepointfive, and the second batch of five will be released next Monday, September 6th.

Searching for a response to our last theme, Commit, we ran into something of a roadblock. Any attempt to take a stance—even a stance of doing nothing—can be wrapped up into this act of commitment posed as some kind of totalizing ethos. There is no space even to respond.

So, in part we respond to this act of encompassing all attempts at action and inaction alike, and in part we respond to the term itself. PLAT 9.5: Leave Space questions the idea of the architect as one who always knows what’s best. It promotes humbleness and asks if architects might take a step back rather than always seeking out the foreground. It seeks the creative potential in the inevitable distance between architect and architecture. A building results from a complex interaction between forces at different scales, from socio-political conditions to community development initiatives, from the involvement of non-humans to the relationships between architects, engineers, and laborers.

But we do not wish to be prescriptive. We think of Leave Space less as a theme to be upheld and more as an entry point, and we’ve set up the issue as a platform for raising questions without imposing answers. Each piece is in an interview format, bringing in different voices from students to scholars and practitioners. The contributors all had a say in what their interview would be about and were free to make what they would of the issue’s title. As a result, each piece has a unique ethos—something in between the contributors’ thoughts and the interviewers' curiosity—to speculate on what it means when we Leave Space.