Jimenez Lai, the young architect and academic who heads Chicago office Bureau Spectacular, spoke recently at SVA about “Cartoonish Architecture." Lai makes striking monochrome cartoons that explore the narratives and personalities of buildings. The cartoons are, in their lyricism, economy, and sincerity, quite powerful. Lai has also completed a number of architectural installations, with another one planned for the fall. He described his own work, unabashedly, as "paper architecture,” and said that that he was working hard to get all of his ideas from drawings into architecture.
There’s a long, fine tradition of paper architecture, from neoclassicists like Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Étienne-Louis Boullée to contemporaries like Lebbeus Woods and Raimund Abraham. Their work seems to swing between two poles: the geometrically idealizing and the apocalyptically ominous. More than they’re drawing buildings, these paper architects are drawing new worlds. Lai’s cartoons are smaller-scaled and gentler. They remind me of Archigram’s happily futuristic renderings and Madelon Vreisendorp’s funny, lovely illustrations in Delirious New York. There is so much pleasure and grace in Lai’s graphic style. One part of me wonders what sort of architecture they will inspire, and another part of me thinks they don’t need to become architecture at all.