Jimenez Lai: A Book of Monsters

Jimenez Lai was born in Taiwan, came of age in Canada, and lives in Los Angeles. Before establishing Bureau Spectacular, Lai lived in a desert shelter at Taliesin and resided in a shipping container at Atelier Van Lieshout on the piers of Rotterdam. Lai's first book, Citizens of No Place: An Architectural Graphic Novel, was published by Princeton Architectural Press with a grant from the Graham Foundation. Lai has won various awards, including the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects, the Debut Award at the Lisbon Triennale, and the Designer of the Future at Art Basel. Lai represented Taiwan at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. Lai's work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, Art Institute of Chicago, the MAXXI Museum and LACMA.

What is a monster? This lecture presents architecture as a practice of characters, caricatures, creatures, figures, postures, and other archetypal narrative constructions. Drawing from built work, speculative projects, and other media experiments, this lecture explores how form can operate analogously to bodies, monsters, and other infrastructural actors - entities that perform, behave, and carry plot points. The lecture will move between buildings, installations, drawings, physical models, and architectural storytelling to examine scale, hyperbolization, and symbolism as disciplinary means. By situating architecture between art history, pop culture, and contemporary urban conditions, this lecture demonstrates a practice that participates in an expanded framework for design - one that embraces ambiguity and theatricality, while remaining deeply engaged with structure, material, program, and the status of cultural norms.