WAI Architecture Think Tank presents LOUDREADERS, a live reading performance at their installation in Stony Island Arts Bank. Inspired by a 20th-century tradition of “loud-reading,” participants share selected texts aloud, creating a communal space for reflection on architecture, urbanism, art, and culture. Each guest becomes a Loudreader, engaging directly with the audience in a performance that celebrates dialogue, solidarity, and emancipatory ideas.
Ames, United States
WebsiteFounded 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.