WAI Architecture Think Tank
Ames, United States
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.
2025 Biennial Project
Project Overview
A LOUDREADING Tribune (A Post-Colonial Still-life of a travelling loudreading workshop)
Inspired by a Caribbean tradition called loudreading—where people read out loud to factory workers all day—the installation invites visitors to read, listen, and talk together about history, power, and freedom. Using books, posters, artwork, and broken pieces of old monuments, the installation challenges colonial stories and explores how public spaces can be used for shared learning. Visitors are encouraged to join in, helping turn the space into a living, changing workshop. Making room for local voices and stories, the project asks us to imagine a future beyond colonialism—one where learning is loud, active, and shared by all.
Previous work
Project Overview
Venue
View moreStony Island Arts Bank
Address
6760 S Stony Island Ave, Chicago, IL 60649
Neighborhood
South Side
Description
Designed by William Gibbons Uffendell and built in 1923, the Stony Island Loan & Savings Bank at 68th and Stony Island was slated for demolition before artist Theaster Gates rescued, restored, and reconstituted the structure in 2015. One of Gates’s most notable spatial projects in Greater Grand Crossing, the Stony Island Arts Bank—a 17,000-square-foot historic building housing Rebuild Foundation’s contemporary art and experimental archival program on Chicago’s South Side—has hosted free exhibitions, screenings, performances, live recordings, artist retreats, artistic and archival residencies, workshops and classes in partnership with local and globally-renown artists over the past decade.
