scale journal, Issue 01, “Lapis”

Published November 15, 2025

The built environment ranges in scale from a wooden step stool to a vast urban landscape. scale journal is a publication bridging various disciplines at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) interested in the built environment. Promoting writing and projects that explore belonging and space, scale journal amplifies underrepresented voices in both academic and lived experience.

From the editors’ note for Issue 01:

This first issue’s theme is Lapis. We have traced this stone’s material history for you from a 21st century examination of a 10th century nun’s dental plaque to the craft traditions of 16th century artisans in the Mughal Empire to the first ever recorded mining practices of the ore from 7000 BCE in present-day Afghanistan. Lapis’s fragmented identity has helped us inform our own multi-dimensional nature. Depending on your perspective, it tells the story of material as ornamentation, material as structure, material as movement, or material as a medium of writing itself. It also explains how we view the built environment: from its original environmental contexts to a historic layering of stories to the re-excavation of such stories in order to discover how we can walk into the future.

The journal was designed by Andrea Mato and Isabel Lee and typeset in Indivisible Variable, Noto Sans, and Truth.

Editor-in-Chief: Henry Ding
Managing Editors: Ram Charan, Roy Kim, and Hannah Oh
Editors: Simone Klein, Oliver McGovern, Zorka Zsembery
Writers: Siya Girdhar, and Jin Xu

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