Mark Robbins Lecture
Ann Lui
Partner, Future Firm
Associate Professor of Practice, University of Chicago
Promises, Promises
What is architecture but a bundle of promises between a group of strangers who—for a brief moment—share a vision of the future for long enough to build it? This talk explores the (seemingly) mundane paperwork of design and construction contracts. Instead of engaging traditional disciplinary considerations such as risk management and professional roles, the ubiquitous AIA A201 General Conditions is reframed as a poetic provocation. Introductions of unlikely thought interlocutors from adjacent fields of science fiction, poetry, and cultural theory, including Ursula K. LeGuin, Elizabeth Bishop, and Lauren Berlant, the contract can be rethought as a potentially prosocial experiment and/or act of dangerous speculation—something that, in its “fine print,” captures the potentially profound transformations that occur through all acts of collaboration.
