Our second reposted article by Megha Chand Inglis focuses on the growth of temple commissions induced by transnational religious organizations, launching what might be called the “industrialization” of temple production.
In 2025, both Megha Chand Inglis and Taro Zheming Cai highlighted moments from the 80s where architectural production was closely tied to cultural identity. These examples, from India and the US, respectively, highlight complex social mechanisms when craft and history come together in built form.
The U.S.-operated United Fruit Company was once the largest private landholder in Central America. C. Williams examines its archaeological work at Zaculeu, Guatemala, arguing that its conservation approach aligned with corporate branding, shaping the landscape and interpretations of the Maya past.
J. Godlewski considers the mangrove forests of the Cross River estuary as difficult, instructive terrain, where resilience and memory take root in the landscape. Neither land nor water, the mangrove offers a way of reading architecture as adaptive, provisional, and intertwined with its surroundings.
What role should architects play in community led housing? In the 60s, nonprofit Urban America set up a Housing Center to support local efforts but it didn’t last long. By 1968, it taking US leaders to tour Europe’s New Towns in search of models allowing expert architect-planners to retain control.
Our second reposted article by Alec R. Stewart highlights ways in which citizens enact resistance and solidarity in the face of immigration raids.
Read the full article below.
As our attention moves towards US aggression across the globe, we are importantly reminded that the tactics of subjugation are also deployed domestically. Today we repost articles from 2025 that both focus on issues of ICE detention and the ways in which citizens enact resistance and solidarity.
“Irksome Dichotomies” explores tensions between data, technology, and architectural history, often framed via misleading oppositions. Ultan Byrne, Anna-Maria Meister, and Emily Pugh critique these binaries—analog vs. digital and humanistic vs. technical—arguing they obscure realities and histories.
Esra Akcan’s Architecture and the Right to Heal examines Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu as a worldmaking place of Balkan & Asian refugees. Residents' history of architecture reveals social and environmental harms of exploitation, pollution, and dispossession. Slum development is resettler nationalism.
January 2026 saw developments in Venezuela and the U.S. that brought the countries into contentious realignment. An aspect of this shift is continuity with the past. In both countries, reshaping space is a question of sovereignty reflected in demands for rearrangements of space, power, and society.
Coalmining established and epitomized capitalist exploitation of land and labor. αὐτόχθονες/autochthon is a polemical introduction to the themes and concerns of Architectures of Coal and Modern Europe (ACME) which seeks to understand coal mining’s overlooked cultural and spatial legacies in Europe.
Oeverlanden, a popular cruising spot outside of Amsterdam long tolerated and even marked by the city, is under threat. Jasper Martens writes about the city's proposal to discipline the zone with a redesign to enhance visibility and surveillance, and obliterate anonymity, a key element of cruising.
The Belgian Friendship Building at VU University was both a partial reconstruction of Belgium’s pavilion at the 1939-40 World’s Fair and a retort to Confederate memorials. James-Chakraborty et. al explore its transition from colonial exhibition to educational space for a largely Black student body.
President Trump has made neoclassical architecture into a cipher for whiteness in his expansion of the White House and his “Make Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” executive order. Kristina Borrman exposes whiteness as a racial category with a long architectural lineage in American public space.
The Global Building Atlas (GBA) is an interactive three-dimensional map of 2.75 billion buildings worldwide. Andrew M. Shanken questions the GBA’s ambitious claims about its data and its assumptions about economic development, casting its uncritical data use as a scientific fable about objectivity.
Daniel E. Coslett explores the appearance of a minaret-like tower in a pair of heritage-based tourism enclaves in Tunisia. Careful observation of contemporary built environments from a transhistorical perspective foregrounds links across time that undermine seemingly rigid chronological divisions.
What role does urban space play in city politics? As Zohran Mamdani begins his historic mayoralty, PLATFORM’s Kishwar Rizvi reflects on his campaign, locating its success not only in policy but in how it cultivated a sense of joy and belonging.
This week, Megan J. Sheard examines the remains of convict brick & timber industries Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania through a landscape-based method. She suggests a way to rethink colonial historiography through Australian Indigenous conceptions of Country. www.platformspace.net/home/bricks-...
Last week, Marco Salazar Valle examines tolas, Indigenous monuments found in northern Ecuador. Tolas, he argues, are landmarks of a colonial legacy of destruction, a legacy that has been challenged by contemporary Indigenous preservation strategies. www.platformspace.net/home/tolas-i...
In installment #2 (also published in Chinese) Cole Roskam, Wang Chun-Hsiung, & Wu Kwang-Tyng continue their discussion of the state of Taiwanese architecture & the geopolitical context that has shaped its professional contours. Read more at the link! www.platformspace.net/home/curatin...
This week, Francesca Piazzoni focuses on migrant older women in Liverpool to challenge narratives on urban demolitions, revealing them as tools for self-empowerment. She emphasizes the need to interrogate assumptions to promote justice-centered practices.
www.platformspace.net/home/unlearn...
Up this week: Adam Nussbaum considers #palestine solidarity protests alongside his architectural education. He offers a lesson for architecture students: try opening your studios to outside collaboration and see what emerges. www.platformspace.net/home/archite...
At the #venicebiennale, Mexico is represented by the project Chinampa Veneta. This week, Sergio Beltrán-García, Elis Mendoza, & Daniel P. Gámez argue that the exhibit mistakenly represents the chinampa as an autonomous object, severed from Indigenous traditions. www.platformspace.net/home/chinamp...
This week, David Monteyne follows the architecture of quarantine as it transitioned from being a spatial approach to public health to becoming a politicized practice of migrant detention--the forerunner, he suggests, of today's detention archipelago. www.platformspace.net/home/quarant...
This week, we reissue 5 articles we previously published to think through carceral formations. From the history of quarantining practices to prison design, these articles invoke architectural histories to probe the spatial parameters of carceral ideologies. www.platformspace.net/home/carcera...
This wk, Jessica Sewell shows how buildings, cities, & things participate in gendered systems of power & shape what is possible for individuals. Through reading our environment, we can understand how these norms are enforced & imagine more equitable cities. www.platformspace.net/home/explori...
In the 2nd installment of PLATFORM's migration series, Arijit Sen critiques the tendency of architectural history to overlook the contributions & lived experiences of immigrant communities, esp. people of color, who haven't left permanent marks on the landscape. www.platformspace.net/home/writing...
This week, Andrew M. Shanken reflects on the meaning of the US penny. Recently an image of the #lincolnmemorial was replaced by a shield, supplanting a potent symbol of struggle, emancipation, & civil rights with a generic symbol of defense. www.platformspace.net/home/farewel...
In November 2024, a canopy collapsed in a landmarked railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia, sparking protests across the country. Maja Babić argues that the collapse is a symptom of the state's neglect of its Yugoslav urban heritage & a catalyst for activism.
www.platformspace.net/home/the-des...
PLATFORM is launching a new series on migration, planned by Sarah Lopez, Ming Kyung Lee & Arijit Sen. The 1st post presents the series' goal to “recenter the movement of people, objects, & knowledge” as the “primary modality of placemaking.” Stay tuned! www.platformspace.net/home/writing...