Building and Writing

The latest exhibition to open at the Graham Foundation in Chicago, Treatise: Why Write Alone?, contains a couple of curious misnomers in its title. “Architects might say, ‘Why writing? It’s not in the job description,’” says Jimenez Lai, the architect who organized the show. “To that, I answer that there’s the building side of architecture and the reasoned, thoughtful side of architecture.”

Then there’s the gravitas of the word “treatise,” which befits the enumerated building manuals of Palladio and Alberti, but not necessarily the work of the author of an “architectural graphic novel.” Lai calls upon a more contemporary precedent instead—Pamphlet Architecture, the series of booklets founded by Steven Holl and William Stout in 1978 and devoted to architectural speculations dreamed up by out-of-work designers. “Basically, the legendary Steven Holl didn’t have a job, but had too many ideas and too much energy to sit still,” Lai explains. “So in the most scrappy way possible, Pamphlet became the place for exercising these thoughts, ideas, and energies. I wanted to recapture that for our time.”

For Treatise, he invited 14 young architects and designers to produce booklets that would be displayed all at once, condensing Pamphlet’s leisurely publishing schedule of roughly one book a year. These “mini-manifestos” are accompanied by visual media and gallery installations. “I wanted to bring all of my friends to the playground,” Lai says, referring to frequent collaborators such as Andrew Kovacs, who contributed two pieces to the Graham Foundation exhibition. Kovacs, best known for founding the architecture blog Archive of Affinities, says that the works—an unsubmitted design to the Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition and a wall installation that proposes a “multiverse” of architectural objects—“really sum up the research I’ve done with the Archive over the past four years, and Treatise allowed me to do that.”