Mark Robbins Lecture
Ann Lui
Partner, Future Firm
Associate Professor of Practice, University of Chicago
Promises, Promises
This talk approaches architecture not as the material production of buildings but as an encounter with the infrastructures of relation that make building possible. In the last century in the U.S., the contractual triangle of “Owner-Architect-Contractor” has served to conceal a more rhizomic field of attachments. This talk comprises a series of meditative vignettes that think through the AIA A201 General Conditions with frameworks from unlikely interlocutors including Ursula K. LeGuin, Lauren Berlant, and Elizabeth Bishop. It uses both anecdotal experience, legal precedent, and small counterfactual experiments to untangle the network of engagements which, in any project, form a bundle in time. Bringing together considerations from both professional practice and theories of relationality, architecture transforms from a singular act of authorship to a proliferating network of promises (affirmed through handshake, SMS thumbs-up, or wet-ink notarized) whose fulfillment is always uncertain and therefore significant and potent.
