2015
2015
The site presented itself as a space made up of self-built houses — no urban zoning, no typologies, no rules, no average family or standard need among its inhabitants. Visitors answered eleven questions about their own immediate living environment; in response, they were invited into a small blank canvas to draw their dream house, either starting fresh or adding to a house someone else had already drawn. The results accumulated into a dense, ever-growing archive — a grid of hundreds of small, individually drawn houses, each one different, visible on the site's own "How" page for anyone to browse or add to. Reaching contributors was its own task: the project was promoted through social media and a dedicated outreach campaign to draw people into answering the survey and adding their own drawing to the archive.
The project's name is a portmanteau of Flatland, E. A. Abbott's novel of multidimensional exploration, and Plotlands, the small, irregularly self-built settlements that emerged in south-east England between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, built outside the conventional planning system. Platlands' own concept followed a similar logic: treating the house as a continuously changing space, shaped as much by domestic habit, planning law, and economic shift as by the idealised, poetic imagination of home that persists underneath all of it — an image the project set out to investigate.
The site's identity carried this through visually: a low-poly, triangulated landscape running across the homepage like a mountain range, paired with a small logomark reading at once as a peaked-roof house and a sealed envelope. Platlands resulted in a printed publication, collecting the drawings and insights gathered from survey respondents into a single volume.
Piccone handled development; the rest of the team — Iuliani, Rizzetto, and the studio founder — worked together on the architectural research and concept, with design and communications carried by the studio founder.
Research & Analysis
Concept Development
Brand & Identity Systems
Naming
Copywriting & Editing
PR & Communications
Campaigns
Print & Digital Design
Digital Development
Editorial & Book Design
Project Management
Team:
Valeria Granillo, Luana Iuliani, Daniele Piccone, Marco Rizzetto.