Archinect - News

The tuition to income ratio is very concerning for all, and terrifying for the Black community

2020-10-09T13:46:00-04:00

Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski of WAI Think Tank have released some very troubling new data as part of their ongoing work studying structural racism in architecture. Part of their research has tracked the cost of tuition, along with other related typical expenses with student living, with the median household income in a number of cities across the US.

In Manhattan, for example, the annual tuition at Columbia GSAPP, in the M.Arch program, costs over $61k, with additional related expenses adding up to nearly $100k. Meanwhile, the median white household income is around $86k and the median Black household income is only $28k.

Archinect Sessions #158: A Conversation with Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia of WAI Architecture Think Tank

The "Anti-Liberation Paywall", part of their larger Manual of Anti-Racist Architectural Pedagogy, describes this problem in detail, and discusses the role of academic institutions as instruments of settler-colonial legacies, displacing infrastruct...

Next Up Mini-Session #15: WAI Architecture Think Tank

2015-12-11T20:27:00-05:00

Over Skype from their homebase in Beijing, WAI Architecture Think Tank partners Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski spoke with Paul Petrunia, on our latest Mini-Session for the Next Up series. Their contribution to the Chicago Architecture Biennial, a rumination on manifestos, looks to the potential forms of architectural persuasion in any medium.

Listen to our Next Up Mini-Session #15 with WAI Architecture Think Tank:

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Walls Islands Frames Mirrors Exhibition Opens in Beijing

2013-08-26T12:20:00-04:00

Walls Islands Frames Mirrors, a joint exhibition by WAI Architecture Think Tank and Ganko has opened at CU Space in 798 Art District. Co-curated by Hao Chen, and Zhang Yanping the show presents a glimpse of recent projects and experiments by WAI and Ganko in a joint exhibition that far from trying to swipe everything under the deceiving carpet of homogeneity, highlights the contrasts and discrepancies, the variety of approaches and the scope of the thoughts that drive these two young practices.

The exhibition includes original collages, photomontages, drawings, models, animations, publications sculptures and objects realized by WAI Think Tank and Ganko during the last two years. Walls Islands Frames Mirrors will be on display until the 31st of August.

Walls Islands Frames Mirrors also serves as a prelude to WAI Think Tank / Garcia Frankowski upcoming exhibition “Pure Hardcore Icons” to be held at the Factory in Dashilar during this year edition of the Beijing Design Week. The ...

What About It? Part 2 goes Online!

2012-08-26T12:24:00-04:00

What About It? Part 2 is now available online on the digital publishing platform ISSUU.

The second issue of the graphic narrative in magazine format created, designed, edited, and written by WAI Architecture Think Tank includes essays, Manifestoes, Projects, Collages and a series of Conversations with: Simona Rota (Madrid); Zhang Ke / standardarchitecture (Beijing); Bernd Upmeyer / MONU (Rotterdam); and Perry Kulper (Michigan).

Manifesto of the WAIzine:

The WAIzine switches rhythm and pace, focus and aim, strategy and method. It goes from pure research, to retroactive manifesto, to speculative provocation. It is ambitious like architecture should be, especially these days of philosophical uncertainty, intellectual laissez faire, economic restraints, and social deterioration.

Rejecting the role of mere spectators of the global spectacle that has been set up by previous generations, the new generation of thinkers should be eager to embrace and confront the world with a pa...

Project 1984: What About the Possibility of a Kynical Architecture?

2012-08-24T12:11:00-04:00

For an architect, in the instant that he has undivided attention of a patron with the power to realize his designs, literally nothing else matters; not a fire alarm, not even an earthquake; there is nothing else to talk about but architecture.

-Dejan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex

The fully developed ability to say No is also the only valid background for Yes, and only through both does real freedom [begin] to take form.

-Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

City
Four towers rise above the city like muscular trunks in a grass field. Their scale obliterates any possible question about the intentionality of their disproportionate size. The exaggerated disparity between them and the urban fabric could not have been accidental. The towers were unquestionably built to be the main focus, the sole object of attention. They are by lengths the most important buildings in the city. The towers deliver an explicit message of datum and order. Visible from any point in the ci...

The Ideology of Publication / Conversation with Bernd Upmeyer

2012-08-14T13:09:00-04:00

Urbanism is one of those malleable concepts that defy definition. A flexible subject where, by trying to lock it within a specific scope, its validity sometimes gets undermined and its potential spoiled.

But when a magazine develops and maintains its own way to portray the multiple faces, forms, shapes, relationships, arguments, contradictions, images, consequences, and messages of the discipline that is supposed to carry the unbearable load of thinking the city, then the exercise of defining urbanism becomes an enriching intellectual journey.

MONU (Magazine on Urbanism) was born in 2004 in Rotterdam. What was originally an almost underground magazine made available through a pdf dossier and a stapled black and white print has evolved into one of the main independent publications, a reference for the collective intelligence of urbanism, and an icon of exquisite aesthetics.

Set to satisfy a growing urbanophilic hunger, MONU has thrown into the mix an intoxicating mixture o...

Discovering Khidekel

2012-07-18T09:46:00-04:00

What About the Last Suprematist?

When one speaks of revolutionary art, two kinds of artistic phenomena are meant: the works whose themes reflect the Revolution, and the works which are not connected with the Revolution in theme, but are thoroughly imbued with it, and are Colored by the new consciousness arising out of the Revolution. -Leon Trotsky

October 1917 opened an architectural Pandora’s Box.
During the Russian revolution, the avant-garde exercises of the Cubo-Futurists, Rayonnists, Suprematists, and Constructivists, paralleled to the unmovable inflexibility of the Stalinist “establishment” to reveal the difference between architecture of the revolution and revolutionary architecture.

While architecture of the revolution responds to the iconoclastic demands of the moment and creates a profusion of icons that portray a specific historical period, revolutionary architecture strives to break with the current paradigms, establishing a new architectural language that detac...

Pure Hardcorism

2012-07-11T19:15:00-04:00

Hard-Core: characterized by or being the purest or most basic form of something. [1]

Manifesto
In the kingdom of architecture the shapes reign supreme. Centuries of the continuous search for a transcendental architecture serve as evidence that a pure shape is the ultimate aesthetic utopia. Hardcorism is the theory of architecture as pure geometric shapes. The first endless architectural manifesto, it announces the advent of an architecture of already known looks. Hardcorism is form as ideology. Ideology as form.

Architects have been searching for the pure shapes ever since they started registering icons on a monumental scale. The pure shapes have become an endless obsession. A Platonic fetish. A recurrent topic. The pure shapes represent the ultimate aspiration of mankind. A direct connection to the gods. Form as temple. Religion as geometry.

Hardcorism is pure form unconcealed. It is blunt, straightforward, explicit, up front. It presents itself as it is, and represents ...

WAIzine 2 Coming Soon (Reserve your copy!)

2012-06-21T13:32:00-04:00

What About It? Part 2 to be released on July 7, 2012

The second issue of the graphic narrative in magazine format by WAI Architecture Think Tank includes essays, Manifestos, Projects, Collages and a series of Conversations with:
Simona Rota (Madrid)
Zhang Ke / standardarchitecture (Beijing)
Bernd Upmeyer / MONU (Rotterdam)
Perry Kulper (Michigan)

To order a printed copy (numbered limited edition of 100) of the WAIzine part 2 please email your order contact@wai-architecture.com (Subject: waizine) and you will receive a reply with the shipping details and an invoice through PayPal. If bank transfer is preferred please let us know.

WAIzine part 2 Information
What About It? Part 1
Soft cover, 100 pages , Black / White, Colour
Dimmensions: 205mm by 275mm
Publisher: WAI Architecture Think Tank Publishers
Language: English

For pricing and more information go to: www.wai-architecture.com

and www.waithinktank.com