WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio practicing by questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism. Founded in Brussels during the financial crisis of 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author and theorist Cruz Garcia and French architect, artist, curator, educator, author and poet Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one of their several platforms of public engagement that include Beijing-based anti-profit art space Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative education platform and trade-school Loudreaders. Based on the emancipating and persecuted alternative practice of education performed by lectores like Luisa Capetillo in the tobacco factories in the Caribbean, Loudreaders is an open pedagogical platform and free trade school that engages with architectural education as a form of mutual aid and critical solidarity in the age of Covid-19.
Garcia and Frankowski are faculty at Virginia Polytechnic and State University, and have held visiting professorships, fellowships, and chair positions at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The School of Architecture at Taliesin. Their work has been part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Neues Museum in Nuremberg, and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology Lisbon. They are authors of Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto, Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture, A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, and the upcoming book From Black Square to Black Reason: A Post-Colonial Architecture Manifesto.
Through the constant ethos of asking ‘What about it’, WAI Architecture Think Tank is a workshop for architecture intelligentsia that speculates on the possibility of:
- Workshops for Anti-Racist Imaginaries
- Workshops for Anti-Ableist Imaginaries
- Workshops for Anti-Capitalist Imaginaries
- Workshops for Anti-Alienating Imaginaries
- Workshops for Anti-Imperialist Imaginaries
- Workshops for Anti-Heteropatriarcal Imaginaries
