The School of Architecture is pleased to announce that Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz García have been selected for the 2019-20 Ann Kalla Professorship in Architecture. The duo are the authors of the forthcoming Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto (Nai010 Publishers, October 2019), an inventive visual and literary atlas of alternative architectural strategies.
Frankowski is a French architect, artist, author, and poet who graduated in 2008 from the department of Architecture, Art and Philosophy at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette with a Diplome d’État d’Architecture option research. Her final project “It Feels Like Home: Chez-soi entre nature et densité” received the special mention from the jury. García is a Puerto Rican architect, artist, author, and theorist who graduated in 2008 from the Universidad de Puerto Rico with a Master’s Degree in Architecture.
In 2008, Frankowski and García co-founded WAI Architecture Think Tank, an international studio practicing architecture from a panoramic approach, the art collective García Frankowski, and founding curators of Beijing-based experimental art and discourse laboratory Intelligentsia Gallery. Educators searching for critical pedagogies, Frankowski and García are former Hyde Chairs of Excellence in Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Visiting Teaching Fellows at The School of Architecture at Taliesin.
“Frankowski and García bring restless energy and keen criticality to their practice,” said Mary-Lou Arscott, studio professor and Associate Head of the SoA. “The school is fortunate to be welcoming the authors of WAI Architecture Think Tank into the school. Their work uses 2- 3- and 4D visuals with text comprising a narrative form to suggest newly imagined worlds that succeed in subverting conventional thinking with fierce poetic irony and insight. Their work is keenly engaged by contemporary issues while it slips in and out of agile references to a future-past.”
During the Kalla Professorship, Frankowski and García will co-teach first-year studio with professor Mary-Lou Arscott in fall 2019, and teach an ASO studio entitled Hardcorist Lectores, and their Worldmaking Laboratories and spring seminar in spring 2020. They will also deliver a lecture during the School of Architecture’s Fall 2019 Lecture Series, and present an exhibition in spring 2020.