PLAT 11: Soft
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Sep 2022
Cover of PLAT 11: Soft designed by SONNENZIMMER
Project Description from PLAT Journal
Where do we begin when we start to talk about architecture? Perhaps with an idea for a building: an office tower, a public library, a secluded garden. We could begin with a drawing, the moment an idea becomes defined, or further, with a set of drawings, where rooms and the assemblies of walls, floors, and roofs give a building its shape through hard lines and planar geometry. We could look at how building materials come to fit these lines: where stone is quarried and cut, how sand is mined and annealed to produce glass, or clay pressed and fired into brick. We could begin with the protocols, procedures, and formalities which we use to partition land and begin construction.
In all of these images, we can find hard boundaries and separations– from the conventions of our drawings, to the way we prepare materials, to the conceptual boundaries of the practice: notions of territory, codes of conduct, what is included, and just as importantly, what is not.
What might it mean for architecture if these lines and boundaries were softened?
“Soft” as a quality can evoke many things: materials, light and atmospheres, touch and craft, a fuzzy boundary, a soft-focus image, landscape and ecology, gentleness, reciprocity in relationships. Our provocation for PLAT 11 is to search for softness in architecture, to engage with the ground and atmosphere, to question its mass, its mark, its permanence. Soft is a quality of material things, of touch, of sounds, of sights, of words, of time. PLAT 11: Soft asks,
How often have our efforts to describe the limits of architecture, limited the capacity architects have to enter into relationships with others? What might it mean for architects to speak softly? What does it look like when we redefine the boundaries of buildings, or push back against easy claims of permanence? Could we shift our focus from producing the built environment to caring and attending to it?
PLAT 11: Soft explores these questions, and begins to ask new ones.
*On the main editorial team developing graphic layout and copy editing
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