PLATFORM: A Ghostly Landscape: Harput Between Confabulation and Denudation I. Confabulations On a hot August morning, I am traveling by minibus with my friend Mustafa, a local historian, to Harput from Elazığ , leaving behind a city sprawling across the plain at a scale t...

Some thoughts on the recent spate of building in Harput #heritage #Armenians #hauntings
tinyurl.com/4udj9h4x

@platformspace.bsky.social last week we shared Zohreh Soltani's insights about the changing meanings of Tehran's famous #Azadi monument, most recently as part of the #WomenLifeFreedom movement

#jinjianazadi

PLATFORM: The Plantation Logic of Nusantara In early 2025, Indonesians learned that Jakarta remained the nation’s capital, at least for the time being. The capital was supposed to shift to Nusantara, the newly built city in East Kalimantan...

@platformspace.bsky.social
#Nusantra –the future #capital of #Indonesia ’s #Nusantara, Robin Hartanto Honggare argues, employs the same #extractivist spatial, social, and economic logic of #plantations as Dutch #colonialism

#colonial #agriculture #decolonization #architecture
shorturl.at/d5Cjw

PLATFORM: Street Hustling in Los Angeles In the early months of the pandemic I, Noah Allison, was waiting to order tacos al pastor from a truck at a gas station in my neighborhood when a tall, dark, muscular man approached me. He had a big s...

This week @platformspace.bsky.social Noah Allison and Víctor Cano Ciborro map street hustling practices by an #unhoused #LosAngeles resident to discuss the pervasive challenges the marginalized face in navigating cities.
#homelessness #urbancartography #publicinfrastructure #LA
shorturl.at/aRJix

On strike against the destruction of public education #ucu

PLATFORM: NRx: A Brief Guide for the Perplexed The rise of J.D. Vance to the Vice Presidency of the United States marks a significant, unsettling turn in American politics, reflecting the mainstreaming of neoreactionary (NRx) ideologies that seek ...

Re-posting: If you're looking for a primer to appreciate the latest political developments in the US, see this @platformspace.bsky.social by the brilliant @rogerjburrows.bsky.social

#NRx #darkenlightenment #libertecture #seasteads

shorturl.at/AecfJ

PLATFORM: Mass Housing in Ukraine: War, Past, Future Housing is the most ubiquitous urban typology. Housing is also the essential armature of the human condition. Perhaps more than any other architectural types, housing determines how city dwellers cons...

At @platformspace.bsky.social this week: on the third anniversary of #Russianinvasion of #Ukraine, Kateryna Malaia and Philipp Meuser write about how they planned to document mass-housing in Ukraine both as #housinghistory and for post-war reconstruction

#Ukranianwar

shorturl.at/ahkxw

about as tempted as when I run into one of those pages 😜

Kinda like the "get the look" sections in popular magazines' celebrity pages

PLATFORM: Fire and Collective Futures The LA fires have drastically amplified the features of climate collapse in the fire-prone terrain—not least the tragedy of people losing loved ones, communities, and homes. Meanwhile, media co...

In the aftermath of #LAFires, this week @platformspace.bsky.social Anousheh Kehar invites us to rethink our relationship with the #environment and re-examine the value of #indigeneouspractices of #landscape management and #livingwithfire

shorturl.at/SR3Xa

post-post-Cold War

The precarious state of the British academia with "Up to 10,000 redundancies or job losses are in prospect."
Yes, we all seem to work in academic plantation at the pleasure of our overlords--Labour or Tory does not seem to matter in a marketized world

PLATFORM: Finding a Place to Live in an Ordinal Society Let’s begin with three vignettes, each featuring a young person in a different city—London, York and Sydney—all navigating the challenges of finding a private rental property in a global housing marke...

AI doesn't want you to live there!
Read the terrifying piece by @rogerjburrows.bsky.social on @platformspace.bsky.social this week, to see how #algorithmicsystems impact the rental market

#eigencapital #rentalmarkets #risk-profiling #tenancy

PLATFORM: Design Technocracy and New School Architecture in Shenzhen, China 点击这里阅读这篇中文文章。 It’s been twenty-eight years since Rem Koolhaas and his team of students from Harvard University Graduate School of Design published Great Leap Forward , which documented and i...

www.platformspace.net/home/design-...

Read about the new schools project in Shenzhen, China with an experimental approach to public design governance, characterized by joint exhibitions, open competitions, collective pilot projects, and public participation, this week in @platformspace.bsky.social

www.platformspace.net/home/design-...

Cummings asks whether Tóth was trying to make a big point about world-historic trauma or just an artist insisting on his vision?

PLATFORM: The Brutalist and the Nightmare of the American Dream This article was originally published on Tropics of Meta .   The French philosopher Simone Weil once said that “the beauty of the world is like the mouth of a labyrinth.” She went on to tell ...

This week on @platformspace.bsky.social, Alex Sayf Cummings considers The Brutalist a film about Lazlo Toth, a Jewish architect, whose life is destroyed by the Holocaust.
www.platformspace.net/home/the-bru...

PLATFORM: From City to Metropolis: Planning without Politics in Hong Kong In a New York Times article on the “For-Profit City” of Próspera, Rachel Corbett situates this new techno-bureaucratic venture off the Honduran coast in relation to nearly 5,400 special economic z...

After a break over the holidays, @platformspace.bsky.social is back this week with a piece about special development zones...

www.platformspace.net/home/from-ci...

Chiwetel Ejiofor reads possibly the funniest letter of recommendation ever YouTube video by Letters Live

Cabinet position?

Maps matter

Trio

CDG at night

A Faculty Member’s Self-Evaluation at the End of the Semester Dear Committee Members, As part of the faculty review process, I am pleased to report to you on my work. In this letter, I will offer information ...

Too close to the bone:

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-f...

RIBA President’s Medals
It was a joy to be a jury member for the dissertation awards
Such good work, great co-judges
#RIBA #PresidentsMedals

PLATFORM: Undecorated: Early Modern Italian Villas as Racial Casts When they were not preoccupied with laborious errands, early modern domestic workers and enslaved peoples recuperated in the basements, mezzanines, and garrets of their patrons’ opulent palazzi and vi...

Dijana O. Apostolski @platformspace.bsky.social that by purposefully undecorated spaces in early modern Italian villas served as racial casts, reifying preconceptions about the "natural" exploitability of racialized and enslaved workers bodies.
www.platformspace.net/home/undecor...

PLATFORM: Water Infrastructure and Resistance at Qurna: Re-reading Hassan Fathy’s Architecture for the Poor “My father avoided the country. To him it was a place full of flies, mosquitos, and polluted water, and he forbade his children to have anything to do with it.” – Hassan Fathy[1] During two recent...

This week on @platformspace.bsky.social, Alex Schultz explores the role of water and local resistance in the conception, design, and downfall of the model village of Qurna spearheaded by modernist architect Hassan Fathy.
www.platformspace.net/home/water-i...

We are moving from X to BlueSky!!

Their job gets harder and harder by the day. We have two here who have to split the task of counterbalancing everything else in the world, lifting us up on their tiny shoulders... 😻 😻

Should I opine about this? 🤔
filed under: know your strength, keep going!

PLATFORM: NRx: A Brief Guide for the Perplexed The rise of J.D. Vance to the Vice Presidency of the United States marks a significant, unsettling turn in American politics, reflecting the mainstreaming of neoreactionary (NRx) ideologies that seek ...

This week in PLATFORM, in a timely (and shocking) essay, my brilliant former colleague @rogerjburrows.bsky.social unpacks the webs of influence underpinning the emergent political situation (and not just limited to the US) and their spatial implications... Brave New World