CFP's - Places Journal
Matthew Heins
Call for Articles: Unforgetting Women Architects
History is almost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their view.
— Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, 1946
History is not a simple meritocracy: it is a narrative of the past written and revised — or not written at all — by people with agendas.
— Despina Stratigakos, Places Journal, 2013
Places Journal is seeking articles that write women and their experiences into the history of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.
The past year has seen the rise of a recharged women’s movement. Galvanized by the 2016 election, women have been organizing protest marches, running for political office, and forging new solidarity in the #MeToo campaign. Deeply reported articles have exposed decades of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in diverse professions — including architecture.
In this moment of heightened awareness, we are newly inspired by Despina Stratigakos’s essay “Unforgetting Women Architects: From the Pritzker to Wikipedia,” published here in 2013. As Stratigakos wrote:
The reasons we forget women architects are varied and complex. Until recently, historians assumed that there were no female practitioners before the mid-20th century and so they did not bother to look. Nor was it likely that they would stumble upon these designers by chance, given that traditional research methods focus on archives and libraries, institutions that have been slow to collect women’s work. … Few archives wanted their papers, and as these women passed away, decades of drawings, plans, and records ended up in the trash. As a result, anyone seeking to learn about their lives and careers has had to be inventive and eclectic in their use of sources in order to supplement the archival documentation conventionally understood as the historian’s primary materials.
Since it was first published, “Unforgetting Women Architects” has motivated numerous Wikipedia edit-a-thons and been expanded into the book Where Are the Women Architects?.Now we want to continue the exploration — to encourage “inventive and eclectic” approaches to telling the untold stories of women in architecture.
We welcome articles about overlooked women throughout history and up to the present. We also welcome unconventional narratives in which the monographic focus on individual artistic genius is challenged — and perhaps replaced by the more expansive framing of a collaborative enterprise. Just as important, we are interested in stories that grapple with difficult causes, deeper structures. For to write women into design history is inevitably to reckon not only with neglected careers but also with cultural norms and hierarchical practices that work to reinforce the status quo. It is a ripe opportunity to scrutinize the dominant narratives of success and power, and to examine the deep-seated biases that have enabled the forgetting of women architects.
Editorial Guidelines
This is an open call with no time limit and no restrictions on genre or format. We welcome proposals or finished manuscripts from scholars, journalists, essayists, designers, and artists. For more information, please read our Submission Guidelines.
Call for Articles: Transformative Practices in Design Education
We, student leaders, stand united in response to misconduct. This cannot end in conversation. This must end in action. We expect and demand respect. We expect and demand transparency. We expect and demand safety. We expect and demand accountability.
— protest sign at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, April 6, 2018
Places Journal is seeking articles on transformative practices in design education, especially as they intersect the world outside the academy.
The design studio can be a hermetic space, steeped in tradition, but it is embedded in a radically changing world. New technologies shape modes of production and visualization. Economic shifts affect enrollment and labor conditions on campus, as well as job prospects for graduates. Political and environmental forces influence the kinds of work designers are trained to do.
Meanwhile, powerful social movements are fighting for equity, inclusion, and diversity on campus. Educators are diversifying their syllabi (if not their hiring). Students are forming “black in design” and “women in design” groups. Yet the work of transforming power structures and building accountability has barely begun.
In the last four months, Dr. Karen Kelsky’s crowdsourced survey “Sexual Harassment in the Academy” has collected nearly 2,500 reports of abuse and misconduct. In the wake of Richard Meier’s reckoning, the anonymously moderated “Shitty Architecture Men” list has been naming names. Some on the list are full-time educators; others are frequent lecturers and participants in design juries and crits. The allegations are unverified, but they can lead to investigation and action.
More generally, the #MeToo movement has spotlighted aspects of design education and design culture — the star system; the charrettes; the entanglement of professional, artistic, and personal relations — that can enable misconduct. Academic cultures and policies have too often shielded abusers from consequences. What responsibility do universities have to ensure the safety of their students and educators? How should the culture of design education change?
Places has explored these themes over the years — in articles like Stan Allen’s “The Future That Is Now,” Tim Love’s “Between Mission Statement and Parametric Model,” and Will Holman’s “Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Design,” as well as in Despina Stratigakos’s book Where Are the Women Architects? — and we’d like to do more of it.
Editorial Guidelines
As a general rule, we are not looking for authors to write about their own teaching or studios, but rather to identify widespread practices and patterns. We are interested in reporting on innovative programs and courses, surveys and investigations of broad trends, and persuasive arguments about changes yet to come, grounded in strong narratives and storytelling.
This is an open call with no time limit and no restrictions on genre or format. We welcome proposals or finished manuscripts. For more, please read our Submission Guidelines.
Call for Articles: Architecture and Democracy
No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions. It was easy to see the immense influence of this basic fact on the whole course of society. It gives a particular turn to public opinion and a particular twist to the laws, new maxims to those who govern and particular habits to the governed. … It creates opinions, gives birth to feelings, suggests customs, and modifies whatever it does not create.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835
The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
— James Baldwin, letter to Sol Stein, 1957
Places Journal is seeking articles that explore the ways in which the ideals and practices of democracy are made manifest in our cities, buildings, and landscapes.
The design of public spaces extends from constructed environments to the spatialized networks and systems that shape a society. How do these support the “equality of conditions” that so impressed Alexis de Tocqueville during his travels through the young republic? And what is lacking in them — now as then?
We are open to diverse approaches to this theme. We are interested in narratives of particular cities and sites of public assembly and social protest, and how these sites are being used, activated, monitored, or compromised. We are interested in spatial histories of the civil rights movement, from the lunch counters and municipal buses that became iconic settings for civil disobedience to the meticulously planned marches that crowded the National Mall, and we are interested too in how today’s social movements extend these histories via street-based actions and online activism.
We invite authors to dig into how democratic principles are sustained or subverted by evolving patterns of land ownership and regulation, by the apparatus of state and corporate surveillance, and by policies which work to protect or curtail individual freedom of movement. How exactly do buildings and landscapes embody our hyper-partisan politics? How are ICE arrests and sanctuary spaces remapping metropolitan networks? Does a kleptocracy betray itself through the works it builds?
But just as important are the routine civil services that uphold an equality of conditions — a democratic infrastructure — and which are now being undercut by disinvestment or malign neglect. In what ways does the U.S. Postal Service, created in 1792 to ensure the uncensored and efficient exchange of news and information, remain essential in the age of Amazon and the internet? How will today’s flow of news and information be changed if the Trump administration’s attempt to repeal net neutrality (now being challenged in court) succeeds, and the broadband internet is privately controlled? What would happen if the U.S. Census Bureau were to take a partisan or inaccurate measure of a rapidly diversifying America? How do laws that protect environmental quality advance the goals of justice and democracy? What happens to community life — community trust — when municipal utilities do not supply clean water to drink? Or when elected officials seem indifferent to the availability of affordable housing or the safety of public schools?
“An environment is also an inward reality,” James Baldwin wrote. “It’s one of the things which makes you, it takes from you and it gives to you, facts which are suggested by the word itself.”
So we ask: what are the architectural conditions of democratic life in the United States and around the world?
Editorial Guidelines
This is an open call with no time limit and no restrictions on genre or format. We welcome proposals or finished manuscripts from scholars, journalists, essayists, designers, and artists. For more information, please read our Submission Guidelines.
Call for Articles: Public and Private
Places Journal seeks articles that explore the complex dynamic of public and private in contemporary politics and culture, and how this dynamic influences the design and production of buildings, landscapes and cities.
This is a large topic, indeed one of the central issues of our time. In the past generation we witnessed a fundamental realignment, as the era of Roosevelt and the New Deal, with its broad-based confidence in the balance of public responsibility and private enterprise, gave way to the age of Reagan, with its faith in unfettered markets and limited government.
In recent years it’s become clear that the commitment to public works has dramatically constricted just as electoral politics and congressional debate have come to revolve around the role of government.
The volatility of the housing market has brought home the risks of deregulation; rising homelessness has stressed the social safety net. Faltering efforts to rebuild in the wake of disaster — from New Orleans to New York to Houston — have exposed the fallout from public disinvestment in urban and environmental infrastructures. Growing opposition to natural gas pipelines and hydraulic fracturing (“no fracking way”) has unified water-drinking citizens across party lines, underscoring the perils of an energy portfolio dominated by fossil fuels.
Earlier this decade we witnessed the brief insurgencies of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Meanwhile we are facing new challenges to the economic liberalism that prevailed for decades, an intensifying awareness of the consequences of privatization — and the dictates of austerity — in the United States and around the globe. This meta-question of public and private remains at the center of discussion in democratic countries.
How will we confront the large-scale social and environmental challenges that are defining our still young century? To what extent will public entities in New York and San Francisco and Miami address the threat of rising seas? How will Los Angeles and Phoenix and Las Vegas adapt to the likelihood of long-term drought? Will the federal government sanction construction of a continental network of gas pipelines, or redouble the commitment to renewables? Will we retrofit our auto-centric suburbs to reduce energy demand? What can the United States learn from other nations?
How might the environmental design professions respond most effectively to these challenges?
At Places we want to analyze these matters via diverse disciplines and from multiple perspectives, including design, policy, planning, geography, history, theory, etc.
Editorial Guidelines
We welcome proposals or finished manuscripts. For more information, please read our Submissions page. This is an open call with no time limit, and we are publishing articles on a continual basis; see Public and Private.