Loudreading Your Story

WAI Architecture Think Tank / Nathalie Frankowski & Cruz Garcia, "A Loudreading Tribune," 2025. Collage of installation.

About the program

Loudreading Your Story

at Stony Island Arts Bank

6760 S Stony Island Ave, Chicago, IL 60649

Open Saturday and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Join Biennial participants WAI Architecture Think Tank for an evening of art, storytelling, and resistance. Part library, part classroom, and part stage, WAI Think Tank’s immersive installation is inspired by a Caribbean tradition called loudreading—where texts were read out loud to factory workers throughout the workday. The space invites audiences to read, listen, and talk together about history, power, and freedom. Artists from Free Street Theater will be on hand with their Story Station, helping you to express your own stories and ideas. Come imagine a future beyond colonialism—one where learning is loud, active, and shared by all. 

This event is presented in collaboration with Chicago Public Library as part of One Book, One Chicago.

Participant

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WAI Architecture Think Tank

Ames, United States

Website

Founded in 2008 by Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski, WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio dedicated to critical spatial practices and alternative design education. Operating across Puerto Rico, France, and the USA, WAI also co-leads LOUDREADERS, an alternative trade school, and Post-Novis, an anti-disciplinary collective. Their work has been exhibited at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and MAAT Lisbon. Garcia and Frankowski, associate professors at Iowa State University, have published Universal Principles of Architecture (Rockport Publishers, 2023), A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education (Loudreaders Publishers, 2021), and Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto (NAi010 Publishers, 2020), among others. WAI interrogates architectural norms through collective pedagogy, poetic critique, and radical reimaginings of the built and unbuilt world.

Chicago Architecture Biennial