PLATFORM
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PLATFORM
@platformspace.bsky.social
· Dec 5
Platform is a digital forum for conversations about buildings, spaces, and landscapes. Join us for timely, provocative, and diverse discussions on the built environment!
Luis Martínez Nespral follows tin-glazed tiles made in France, reaching both North Africa and South America in unequal extractive trade routes. The "little man" motif depicted reveals a South-South connection and shows how commerce prolonged asymmetries after the Iberian empires withdrew.
PLATFORM: The Little Man on the Tile
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Southern Cone (Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina) received an enormous quantity of French tiles used extensively in local construction. These tiles w...
www.platformspace.net
September 23, 2026 at 9:40 PM
Luis Martínez Nespral follows tin-glazed tiles made in France, reaching both North Africa and South America in unequal extractive trade routes. The "little man" motif depicted reveals a South-South connection and shows how commerce prolonged asymmetries after the Iberian empires withdrew.
What happens when a university becomes a home front? The 2024 McGill encampment made campus a site where war, knowledge, and legitimacy were contested. Its most lasting legacy is the transformation in how students learned to read and inhabit the university.
PLATFORM: The Home Front: Campus, Control, and Tent Protests
In the spring of 2024, tent camps were set up at approximately 120 to 140 universities in the United States and 25 public universities in Canada. These encampments were set up in solidarity with Pales...
www.platformspace.net
September 15, 2026 at 1:18 PM
What happens when a university becomes a home front? The 2024 McGill encampment made campus a site where war, knowledge, and legitimacy were contested. Its most lasting legacy is the transformation in how students learned to read and inhabit the university.
In the photoessay “Decommissioned Routes on the Alaska Highway: A New Life for an Old Bridge?,” cultural landscapes scholar Desiree Valadares trains her lens on the weathered remains of the Old Kiskatinaw Bridge, a historic trestle timber structure in British Columbia.
PLATFORM: Decommissioned Routes on the Alaska Highway: A New Life for an Old Bridge?
Weakened by rot and discolored by rust, this photo essay explores the weathered remains of the Old Kiskatinaw Bridge in British Columbia. A vestige of the original ALCAN or Alaska Highway, conceived...
www.platformspace.net
September 8, 2026 at 8:53 PM
In the photoessay “Decommissioned Routes on the Alaska Highway: A New Life for an Old Bridge?,” cultural landscapes scholar Desiree Valadares trains her lens on the weathered remains of the Old Kiskatinaw Bridge, a historic trestle timber structure in British Columbia.
UK new towns (1946–73) loom large in modern architectural and planning history, but they're just one part of a wider land-use story pursuing social and economic goals. Alistair Fair examines a lesser-known strand of that story: Scotland's Central Borders plan for a new kind of 'exploded city'.
PLATFORM: Exploding the City
Britain’s twentieth-century new towns are rightly celebrated as landmarks in architectural and planning history . They have long attracted considerable attention and continue to inspire much work by ...
www.platformspace.net
September 1, 2026 at 3:32 AM
UK new towns (1946–73) loom large in modern architectural and planning history, but they're just one part of a wider land-use story pursuing social and economic goals. Alistair Fair examines a lesser-known strand of that story: Scotland's Central Borders plan for a new kind of 'exploded city'.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi reflects on migration as an entanglement of multiple forms of historical and architectural research. Drawing on research for the book Architecture of Migration, she argues for learning from migrants, who make place under duress. They are, she asserts, the avant-garde.
PLATFORM: Finding the Avant-Garde: Migration as a Method
Writing migration now is essential, as we face relentless injustice, moral injury, and violence to the Earth. We must learn from migrants, who make place under duress. They are the avant-garde. Arch...
www.platformspace.net
August 25, 2026 at 6:04 AM
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi reflects on migration as an entanglement of multiple forms of historical and architectural research. Drawing on research for the book Architecture of Migration, she argues for learning from migrants, who make place under duress. They are, she asserts, the avant-garde.
蛇口遗产再出发”运动的兴起，标志着中国当代遗产保护范式的深刻转型——不再将遗产视为静态的文物标本，而是将其重构为一种动态的、由社区驱动的持续性社会进程。蛇口作为中国1979年改革开放的“试验田”，其探索挑战了传统遗产实践中偏重古迹、纪念性建筑与旅游化展陈的路径依赖。本文依托批判性遗产研究视角，追溯这一草根行动如何从2024年底广东浮法玻璃厂（价值工厂）标志性立柱面临拆除的危机中发轫：居民自发守护、社交媒体声援与学界介入，共同推动政府紧急叫停改造计划，也在粤港澳大湾区日益高涨的遗产保护共识中，促成了行政决策的审慎转向。通过锚定生活记忆、民主自组织与适应性再利用，蛇口正在成为一个活态遗产实验室.
PLATFORM: 守护改革：蛇口城市记忆与全球遗产社区主导保护模式的兴起
Click here to read this post in English. 引言：“试管”里的批判性遗产实践 在全球资本主义的词汇表中，鲜有地方能像蛇口——这片位于中国广东省深圳市南山区最南端的自由贸易区那样，承载如此厚重的象征意义。1979年1月31日，蛇口正式确立为中国经济改革的“试管”，以其独特的城市化经济自由化模式，在全球新旧城市中引发了深远的涟漪效应，成为二十世纪末世界秩...
www.platformspace.net
August 18, 2026 at 1:54 AM
蛇口遗产再出发”运动的兴起，标志着中国当代遗产保护范式的深刻转型——不再将遗产视为静态的文物标本，而是将其重构为一种动态的、由社区驱动的持续性社会进程。蛇口作为中国1979年改革开放的“试验田”，其探索挑战了传统遗产实践中偏重古迹、纪念性建筑与旅游化展陈的路径依赖。本文依托批判性遗产研究视角，追溯这一草根行动如何从2024年底广东浮法玻璃厂（价值工厂）标志性立柱面临拆除的危机中发轫：居民自发守护、社交媒体声援与学界介入，共同推动政府紧急叫停改造计划，也在粤港澳大湾区日益高涨的遗产保护共识中，促成了行政决策的审慎转向。通过锚定生活记忆、民主自组织与适应性再利用，蛇口正在成为一个活态遗产实验室.
In “Conserving Reform,” Ke Song frames the Shekou Heritage initiative through the lens of Critical Heritage Studies, arguing Shekou represents a living laboratory where heritage is not a static relic but a dynamic, contested process of social negotiation between local values and state oversight.
PLATFORM: Conserving Reform: A Community-Led Model for Maintaining Urban Memory and Global Heritage in Shekou
Click here to read this post in Chinese. Introduction: Critical Heritage Practice in the “Test Tube” In the lexicon of global capitalism, few places carry the symbolic weight of Shekou, the free...
www.platformspace.net
August 17, 2026 at 3:57 PM
In “Conserving Reform,” Ke Song frames the Shekou Heritage initiative through the lens of Critical Heritage Studies, arguing Shekou represents a living laboratory where heritage is not a static relic but a dynamic, contested process of social negotiation between local values and state oversight.
In Corridors of Capital Demiroglu and Meza analyze the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Kazakhstan-China oil pipelines, arguing their divergent financing—Western multilateral vs. Chinese sovereign—produces contrasting territorial regimes: avoidance of minority populations in one, incorporation in the other.
PLATFORM: Corridors of Capital: Competing Systems of Financing and Worldmaking in Eurasia
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) and Kazakhstan-China (KzC) oil pipelines are not simply infrastructures for moving hydrocarbons across vast distances; they are worldmaking devices that inscribe politica...
www.platformspace.net
August 11, 2026 at 1:49 AM
In Corridors of Capital Demiroglu and Meza analyze the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Kazakhstan-China oil pipelines, arguing their divergent financing—Western multilateral vs. Chinese sovereign—produces contrasting territorial regimes: avoidance of minority populations in one, incorporation in the other.
Ziad Jamaleddine rethinks the Arabic term al-khirba (ruin) as a framework for architectural renewal, challenging modern preservation models. Drawing on Nasser Al Salem’s Holy Limits, Kaʿba histories, and L.E.FT’s work, Jamaleddine argues buildings can transform while maintaining communal value.
PLATFORM: Al-khirba: Building Renewal While Preserving Community Value
The following text, “Al-khirba: Building renewal while preserving community value,” is an excerpt from L.E.FT Architects’ book At the Edge of Where God Built (Akhir ma ‘Ammar Allah) : Language...
www.platformspace.net
August 4, 2026 at 4:31 AM
Ziad Jamaleddine rethinks the Arabic term al-khirba (ruin) as a framework for architectural renewal, challenging modern preservation models. Drawing on Nasser Al Salem’s Holy Limits, Kaʿba histories, and L.E.FT’s work, Jamaleddine argues buildings can transform while maintaining communal value.
Set in Tehran during and after the 2026 war, Sadaf Tabatabaei traces how grief is organized across public space. Tabatabaei asks why some losses are made visible while others are denied recognition, and how the city becomes a contested ground of grievability, remembrance, and refusal.
PLATFORM: After Maghreb: The Spatial Politics of Grief in Wartime Tehran
Set in Tehran during and after the 2026 war, this essay traces how grief is organised across public space. Moving between state-sponsored commemorations and unofficial acts of mourning, it asks why so...
www.platformspace.net
July 28, 2026 at 5:04 AM
Set in Tehran during and after the 2026 war, Sadaf Tabatabaei traces how grief is organized across public space. Tabatabaei asks why some losses are made visible while others are denied recognition, and how the city becomes a contested ground of grievability, remembrance, and refusal.
At Lycée Fresnel rehabilitation work reveals tensions hidden behind current celebrations of adaptive reuse, and highlights architecture's relationship to compromise rather than resolution. Sleiman argues reuse is not continuity without loss, but rather deciding which contradictions remain inhabited.
PLATFORM: The Building That Says No: Reuse Against the Fantasy of the New
The rehabilitation of Lycée Fresnel in Paris reveals the tensions hidden behind contemporary celebrations of adaptive reuse. Through the transformation of a 1957 school building designed by Roger Rich...
www.platformspace.net
July 21, 2026 at 2:21 AM
At Lycée Fresnel rehabilitation work reveals tensions hidden behind current celebrations of adaptive reuse, and highlights architecture's relationship to compromise rather than resolution. Sleiman argues reuse is not continuity without loss, but rather deciding which contradictions remain inhabited.
Anna Andrzejewski considers how fieldwork can revitalize large undergraduate courses in architectural history. Drawing on bell hooks’s ideas of "engaged pedagogy,” she discusses her reorganization of a lecture course, giving students freedom to engage in hands-on research of campus-area buildings.
PLATFORM: Fieldwork and the Practice of Freedom in the University Classroom
As a scholar focused on interpreting vernacular cultural landscapes, fieldwork is at the core of my research. While what constitutes “the field” of fieldwork is broad, the idea of moving outside of th...
www.platformspace.net
July 14, 2026 at 3:45 AM
Anna Andrzejewski considers how fieldwork can revitalize large undergraduate courses in architectural history. Drawing on bell hooks’s ideas of "engaged pedagogy,” she discusses her reorganization of a lecture course, giving students freedom to engage in hands-on research of campus-area buildings.
In 2026 a monument opened in Lower Manhattan: Al Qalam: Poets in the Park. Designed by Moroccan artist Sara Ouhaddou, and commissioned by the Washington Street Historical Society, a sculpture and two mosaic benches commemorate a Little Syria immigrant enclave that stood nearby until the 1940s.
PLATFORM: Commemorating New York’s Little Syria at Al Qalam
Into the urban cacophony of New York City’s Financial District, a new memorial arrived a few weeks ago: Al Qalam: Poets in the Park . The artwork sits in Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza , a small ob...
www.platformspace.net
July 7, 2026 at 4:40 AM
In 2026 a monument opened in Lower Manhattan: Al Qalam: Poets in the Park. Designed by Moroccan artist Sara Ouhaddou, and commissioned by the Washington Street Historical Society, a sculpture and two mosaic benches commemorate a Little Syria immigrant enclave that stood nearby until the 1940s.
Erica Allen-Kim examines aging suburban Chinese malls in Toronto as spaces shaped by migration, aging, and reuse. Allen-Kim highlights ways immigrant shop owners extend the life of plazas beyond redevelopment pressures, turning them into intergenerational spaces that persist amid urban change.
PLATFORM: Meet Me at the Plaza: Migration and Aging in the Suburbs
North American suburbs are aging, both their residents and built landscapes. Shopping centers built in the 1960s are reaching the end of their life cycle, with mixed-use high-density projects replacin...
www.platformspace.net
June 30, 2026 at 3:03 AM
Erica Allen-Kim examines aging suburban Chinese malls in Toronto as spaces shaped by migration, aging, and reuse. Allen-Kim highlights ways immigrant shop owners extend the life of plazas beyond redevelopment pressures, turning them into intergenerational spaces that persist amid urban change.
*Repost* Stathis G. Yeros examines Just Us Lounge, a queer bar in Mississippi, as a site of community-building and resilience in the Deep South, and situates the bar’s founder, Lynn Koval, and her strategies of collective care within the politics of Mississippi’s queer life after gay liberation.
PLATFORM: Mississippi Violet
My first attempt to drive to the only gay bar I had heard about on the Mississippi stretch of the Gulf coast missed the exit. When I realized that my GPS went haywire, I took the first ramp I saw off ...
www.platformspace.net
June 26, 2026 at 4:25 AM
*Repost* Stathis G. Yeros examines Just Us Lounge, a queer bar in Mississippi, as a site of community-building and resilience in the Deep South, and situates the bar’s founder, Lynn Koval, and her strategies of collective care within the politics of Mississippi’s queer life after gay liberation.
We are celebrating pride month by highlighting articles that explore lesbian and queer communities across the globe, and the ways that constructed spaces like tents and a local bar provided opportunities for community building and collective activism.
See the first article by Qiran Shang below.
See the first article by Qiran Shang below.
PLATFORM: See You at the Lesbian Tent: Architecture and Politics of Transnational Lesbian Activism
In March 2025, Outright International —an LGBTIQ human rights non-governmental organization (formerly the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, IGLHRC)—posted a set of visuals on Ins...
www.platformspace.net
June 24, 2026 at 4:19 AM
We are celebrating pride month by highlighting articles that explore lesbian and queer communities across the globe, and the ways that constructed spaces like tents and a local bar provided opportunities for community building and collective activism.
See the first article by Qiran Shang below.
See the first article by Qiran Shang below.
In “Housing Hong Kong,” Cole Roskam shows that chronic land scarcity, segregationist colonial policies, and supply shortages formed the bases for the city’s expensive housing conditions. Despite the government's commitment to public housing, these linkages pose economic and ideological challenges.
PLATFORM: Housing Hong Kong
In early May, the Hong Kong government’s Housing Bureau announced that the average waiting time for a public housing unit in the special administrative region (SAR) had dropped to 4.7 years—the lowe...
www.platformspace.net
June 16, 2026 at 2:07 AM
In “Housing Hong Kong,” Cole Roskam shows that chronic land scarcity, segregationist colonial policies, and supply shortages formed the bases for the city’s expensive housing conditions. Despite the government's commitment to public housing, these linkages pose economic and ideological challenges.
Alhelí Harvey introduces “aesthetic piracy” to critically read the development of a 3-D printed luxury hotel in Marfa, Texas. Contextualizing these structures within the adobe built traditions, she argues that adobe structures are materially and affectively emblematic of Muñoz’s brown commons.
PLATFORM: Aesthetic Piracy
“Brown indexes a certain vulnerability to the violence of property, finance, and to capital’s overarching mechanisms of domination. Things are brown by law insofar as even those who claim legal belong...
www.platformspace.net
June 9, 2026 at 4:06 AM
Alhelí Harvey introduces “aesthetic piracy” to critically read the development of a 3-D printed luxury hotel in Marfa, Texas. Contextualizing these structures within the adobe built traditions, she argues that adobe structures are materially and affectively emblematic of Muñoz’s brown commons.
Through Punjabi migrant histories in early 20th-century California, oral testimony, site visits, and family memory authors Ranganath and Sen expand the archive to reveal how migrants remade domestic and social worlds under exclusion, producing fragile spaces of kinship, resilience, and belonging.
PLATFORM: Doing Architectural Histories in Dark and Cruel Times
In the United States, the deliberate separation of immigrant families —regardless of legal status—has become a weapon of state power. Detention centers operate as sites of systematic inhumanity , s...
www.platformspace.net
June 1, 2026 at 5:12 PM
Through Punjabi migrant histories in early 20th-century California, oral testimony, site visits, and family memory authors Ranganath and Sen expand the archive to reveal how migrants remade domestic and social worlds under exclusion, producing fragile spaces of kinship, resilience, and belonging.
Amina Kaskar examines “soft architecture” as a practice of survival and resistance in Palestine. For the Youth of Sumud, a group of Palestinian college students in the South Hebron Hills, At-Tuwani rubble becomes material for memory and agency, reclaiming space under settler-colonial displacement.
PLATFORM: From Rubble to Resistance: Soft Architecture of Displacement in Palestine
"From Rubble to Resistance" examines “soft architecture” as a practice of survival and resistance in Palestine. Through the Youth of Sumud, a collective of Palestinian university students in the South...
www.platformspace.net
May 25, 2026 at 5:04 PM
Amina Kaskar examines “soft architecture” as a practice of survival and resistance in Palestine. For the Youth of Sumud, a group of Palestinian college students in the South Hebron Hills, At-Tuwani rubble becomes material for memory and agency, reclaiming space under settler-colonial displacement.
Özge Kurban explores the scarcely recorded landscape and experiences of communities submerged by the Keban Dam. Juxtaposing official state discourse with literary narratives by local authors, Kurban reveals contradictions surrounding the dam’s history and the different temporalities it represents.
PLATFORM: Irreconcilable Imaginaries: Representations, Landscape, and Conflicting Temporalities of a Large Dam in the Upper Euphrates
When I first visited the town of Keban for my research, I came across a facility built not quite in the center of this stagnant town, yet not far from it either. While the historical town center was l...
www.platformspace.net
May 18, 2026 at 5:34 PM
Özge Kurban explores the scarcely recorded landscape and experiences of communities submerged by the Keban Dam. Juxtaposing official state discourse with literary narratives by local authors, Kurban reveals contradictions surrounding the dam’s history and the different temporalities it represents.
Pol Fité Matamoros examines how fascist movements transform crisis into a spatial project of national rebirth. Focusing on early twentieth-century Spain, Matamoros argues that fascism rendered political renewal through maps, images, and spatial representations—a dynamic that still resonates today.
PLATFORM: Mapping Fascism: What Spain’s Past Reveals About the U.S. Today
This essay examines how fascist movements transform crisis into a spatial project of national rebirth. Focusing on early twentieth-century Spain, it shows how images, maps, and spatial representations...
www.platformspace.net
May 11, 2026 at 3:30 PM
Pol Fité Matamoros examines how fascist movements transform crisis into a spatial project of national rebirth. Focusing on early twentieth-century Spain, Matamoros argues that fascism rendered political renewal through maps, images, and spatial representations—a dynamic that still resonates today.
What makes Chianti wine Italian? Lee describes how its identity is engineered through global migrations of people, plants, and practices in the Tuscan hills. The myth of terroir masks a complex and transnational system—revealing “local” food as an invention shaped by capital, culture, and belonging.
PLATFORM: Invented Food Identities: Entangled Migrations and Representation of the Chianti Landscape
Xenophobic sentiments have intensified in current US political rhetoric, arguing that manufactured products should be solely homegrown. The Trump administration has made the Made in America Agenda ...
www.platformspace.net
May 4, 2026 at 10:54 PM
What makes Chianti wine Italian? Lee describes how its identity is engineered through global migrations of people, plants, and practices in the Tuscan hills. The myth of terroir masks a complex and transnational system—revealing “local” food as an invention shaped by capital, culture, and belonging.
What is infrastructure, and to whom it belongs? Against the language of war that conceals the price paid by ordinary people, Sahar Hosseini reads Ali Ghamsari’s playing before a powerplant in Tehran as a sonic insistence that infrastructure belongs to life, not to the logic of war.
PLATFORM: The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure Under Fire
Infrastructure is usually invisible, until it is gone or stops working. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure under Fire” takes the 2026 US-Israeli war on Iran as the occasion to ask what infras...
www.platformspace.net
April 28, 2026 at 3:03 PM
What is infrastructure, and to whom it belongs? Against the language of war that conceals the price paid by ordinary people, Sahar Hosseini reads Ali Ghamsari’s playing before a powerplant in Tehran as a sonic insistence that infrastructure belongs to life, not to the logic of war.
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.
PLATFORM: From Mine to Mandir: Industrial Modernity in the Lives of Temple Builders of Western India
11 am, April 19, 2018, Ambaji , Banas Kantha district, Gujarat, on the borders with Rajasthan. I am standing on the edge of an open-cast marble mine, looking down 60 to 80 metres. The site invites my...
www.platformspace.net
April 21, 2026 at 12:47 AM
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.