THE AMERICAN RESOLUTION: CREATING PROPERTY THROUGH WRITING, DRAWING, AND BUILDING [2026]
[PLAT 14: RESOLUTION | READ THE ARTICLE HERE]
PLAT is an independent architectural journal whose purpose is to stimulate relationships between design, production, and theory. It operates by interweaving professional and academic work into an open and evolving dialogue which progresses from issue to issue. Curating worldwide submissions in two annual issues, PLAT is a projective catalyst for architectural discourse. This issue was edited and designed by Max Stith, Jayden Yan, Abby Chen, Sean Choi, Prea Davis, Tianai Duan, Mingru Han, Yousif Giyo, Deniz Kantar, William Yiming Liu, Kirstie Qian, Musab Salah, Osvaldo Salgado, Ghazal Torkamaniha, Whitney Walden, Sophie Valbrune, Moxuan (Grace) Xu, and Zhan (Michael) Zhong,
ISSUE ABSTRACT:
As fields become increasingly interdisciplinary, their boundaries dissolve and overlap. The limits of one begin to simultaneously inscribe another. As of late, our understanding of architecture has evolved into a description of such overlaps. We have asked how the borders of architecture soften, but what form do they ultimately take? Design serves as the methodology through which this form emerges. As design explores these blurred edges, artifacts are either sharpened or further obscured. In a discipline of approximations, architects must come to a resolution.
Resolution — a firm decision, the act of solving a problem, or the state between clarity and ambiguity. Architecture negotiates between the clarity of drawings and the ineffable essence of a building. As the resolution of architectural objects shifts between mediums (physical models, drawings, Instagram, renders, magazine photography, presentation boards.), how do these paradigms reshape not only the image of architecture but also the architecture of the image?
ARTICLE ABSTRACT:
In law, a resolution is a proposal made in writing. In United States property law, Foot’s Resolution of 1829 was a proposal made in writing to limit the sale of public lands in the West. It was written at a time when Westerners wanted, on the one hand, to acquire homes of their own and to commence the arduous business of farm making, and, on the other hand, to sell a relinquishment of their improvements or to mortgage the land they had selected to obtain capital for additional improvements. Westerners saw Senator Samuel Augustus Foot, a member of the National Republican Party and a Yankee from one of the old states, the same way they saw many Easterners—as hostile and jealous of the “brave, hardy, and enterprising people” who gave value to land and made it sell. Conversely, Foot saw the Westerners as “greedy, lawless land grabbers” who profited from the federal government’s bounty. This essay argues that both—and yet, neither—stereotypes were true: Easterners and Westerners simply created property differently, with Easterners writing descriptions and drawing boundaries and Westerners building houses. By juxtaposing hand-drawn surveys and auto-constructed dwellings, as well as historical maps and contemporary annotations, this essay reveals the increase of architecture’s importance in the federal valuation of land from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century and from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast, thereby destabilizing the binary of the industrial East and the agrarian West and resolving the tension between the old states and the new territories.