Call for Submissions

The Pratt Journal of Architecture invites submissions of written and/or visual content for the latest volume of the journal. We encourage anyone with an interest in the topics for this issue to contribute to the conversation: architects, artists, philosophers, students, economists, futurists, etc.

For its fourth volume, the Pratt Journal of Architecture  will  revive  the dialogue from the former volume, on Making, published twenty-one years ago. The resulting publication will be a blending of questions posed nearly a generation ago and answers altered by the tools and policies that have come to define our world.

Our interest lies in the evolution of an action—making—that dominates our lives as creators and as students. The act of making no longer implies a closed circuit of mind, tool, and object. Over the last two decades, the introduction of new tools has resulted in an increasingly tenuous relationship between the mind—the maker— and the made object.   We have seen the emergence of a digitally-driven design environment, the product of which is not tangible.  Alternatively, the introduction of new machining typologies have given us the ability to bring into reality what could formerly only exist virtually— closing the circuit again, a much more populated circuit.

Making, on a societal level, has distinctly changed along with a new generation of world leaders.  Governmental policies and social systems internationally are imposing limits on what can and cannot be made, as well as defining the purpose for objects or non-objects.  We begin to wonder whether the made object is a result of necessity or desire:  printing weapons for wars; rebuilding fallen monuments; programming machines to accomplish our own tasks.

8 / 1 / 2013