Plat

In 1833, Joseph Smith drew a model for a heavenly city and called it the Plat of Zion. He said it was shown to him in a vision. If heaven will indeed one day be on earth, will it appear, as Joseph Smith argued, as a grid? When and how does an imaginary or theoretical space come down to earth to construct the real? Plat thinks through gender, death, and memory using the language and iconography of Mormon temples, warped and chopped and made strange. It questions the impulse to speculate: both about why a loved one chose to die, and about the land. Plat conflates physical and abstract space to investigate, in part, how investments in “naturalness” warp and disguise all built environments—everything from actual physical architecture to Christian ideas about gender and heaven, and other difficult utopias. At bottom, this book asks: what’s the difference between a church and a death? A dream and a memory? A temple and a poem?