Jimenez Lai’s work is on display among fourteen other designers
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The Graham Foundation’s latest exhibition, “Treatise: Why Write Alone” is an ode to contemporary architects who poke at the boundaries of their profession. The boundaries delineate both the construction of form and space and that of the theoretical and pedagogical sphere these young designers inhabit. The exhibition, mounted on three floors of the Graham Foundation’s expansive Gold Coast mansion, features fourteen design studios whose work challenges the discipline of architecture through novel methods, materials and forms. The show is curated by Jimenez Lai, a recent Chicago expat and last year’s “Design 50” inductee. Lai included a dizzying range of work, with each participant contributing both physical artifacts as well as a narrative—the treatise we encounter in the title—on architecture and practice. The gallery show will be accompanied by a forthcoming publication that assembles the fourteen treatises; it’s due out March 18, with a corresponding reception and panel discussion. The display of models, drawings, digital and interactive media is vastly varied, but all are united by a certain avant-garde perspective. This makes the exhibition coherent and exciting, albeit fantastical. Some of the selected material will no doubt be polarizing to viewers; but perhaps that’s the whole point. (Nick Cecchi)
Through March 28 at Graham Foundation, Madlener House, 4 West Burton Place
