Flat Out is a semi-annual magazine that enacts genres of architectural criticism and polemic through fifteen imaginary personas played by a diverse set of authors each time. Our contributors are to their characters what Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Daniel Craig are to James Bond; what Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, and Michelle Pfeiffer are to Catwoman. You don't need to know who they are, just what they're saying when they are playing someone else. Flat Out emanates from America's midwestern plains, where the forgotten and discarded confront the not-yet-imagined.

Penelope Dean is associate professor at the UIC School of Architecture. Her research focuses on contemporary architectural culture with an emphasis on the exchanges between architecture and the allied design fields. Dean's writings have appeared in Architectural Design, the Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Log, hunch, Praxis, and Flat Out, and her research supported by a visiting scholar’s residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, previously worked as an architect for the Dutch office MVRDV, and has served in various editorial capacities for hunch, Content, KM3, and Crib Sheets. She is founding editor of Flat Out.