Event Description
Puerto Rican architect and professor Cruz Garcia will deliver a hybrid guest lecture and interactive workshop on the practice of LOUDREADERS, a platform for public vocational education in architecture, urbanism, and related fields. Co-founded by Garcia, LOUDREADERS produces, designs, and supports a public literacy of the built and destroyed environment by means of online and physical exhibitions, publications, lectures, symposia, workshops, events, installations, and spaces.
LOUDREADERS borrows its name from an alternative practice of education at the turn of the 19th and early 20th centuries, created when tobacco workers engaging in the monotonous labor of rolling cigars hired one of their own who knew how to read, as a lector (loud-reader) to read aloud to them during the entire workday. As the practice of loud reading grew, the lectores became traveling performers with an international audience, creating networks of solidarity throughout the Caribbean, as well as a massive, shared, open-access oral library for workers who were denied any other means of formal education.
This event invites attendees to explore the relationship between architecture, landscapes, critical theory, anti-coloniality, resistance movements, and global networks of solidarity through the practice of loud-reading. Curated student projects from the College of Environmental Design will be exhibited and loud-read by students during this event, creating a collaborative and interactive lecture, workshop, and exhibition experience.
Speaker
Cruz Garcia (Architecture, Iowa State University) conducts research on design education and pedagogy and has a wide range of research interests, including post-colonial theory, narrative architecture, and biopolitics. Their work has been part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial and included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology Lisbon.
Garcia is co-author of Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto (nai010, 2020) and Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture (Artifice Books on Architecture 2013, China Architecture and Building Press 2021). They are co-founder of WAI Architecture Think Tank, a planetary studio practicing by questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism through a panoramic and critical approach. In response to the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic, WAI Architecture Think Tank launched LOUDREADERS, a multi format platform that establishes networks of solidarity around the world while discussing urgent positions, discourses, and media about architecture, urbanism, art, and culture.
Co-sponsorship
Presented by the Anticolonial Workshop Working Group, supported by CLACS. Co-sponsored by the Graduate Assembly and the National Association of Minority Landscape Architects.