© 2015 Jimenez Lai - All Rights Reserved.

BUREAU SPECTACULAR imagines other worlds and engages the design of architecture through telling stories. Beautiful stories about character development, relationships, curiosities and attitudes; absurd stories about fake realities that invite enticing possibilities. The stories conflate design, representation, theory, criticism, history and taste into cartoon pages. These cartoon narratives swerve into the physical world through architectural installations, models and small buildings.

JIMENEZ LAI is a faculty member at UCLA and taught at University of Illinois at Chicago. He graduated with a Master of Architecture from University of Toronto. Previously, Jimenez Lai lived and worked in a desert shelter at Taliesin and resided in a shipping container at Atelier Van Lieshout on the piers of Rotterdam. Before founding Bureau Spectacular, Lai worked for various international offices, including OMA. Lai is widely exhibited and published around the world, including the MoMA-collected White Elephant. His first manifesto, Citizens of No Place, was published by Princeton Architectural Press with a grant from the Graham Foundation. Draft II of this book has been archived at the New Museum as a part of the show

Younger Than Jesus. Lai has won various awards, including the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Debut Award at the Lisbon Triennale. In 2014, Lai designed theTaiwan Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architectural Biennale. In 2015, Lai organized the Treatise exhibition and publication series at the Graham Foundation, and was recently included in the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection.

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Cave Painting VIII: White Noise from Another PastThe Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USAChatter: Architecture Talks BackApril 11, 2015 - July 12 2015

Treatise: Why Write Alone?The Graham Foundation, Chicago, Illinois, USATreatise: Why Write Alone?January 23, 2015 - March 28, 2015

White ElephantThe Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, USAConceptions of Space: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary ArchitectureJuly 4, 2014 - October 19, 2015

Township of Domestic Parts: Made in TaiwanVenice Architectural Biennale, Venice, ItalyFundamentalsJune 7, 2014 - November 23, 2014

99 Chairs / SpeechbusterStorefront for Art & Architecture, New York, New York, USAIdeas City Festival, New MuseumMay 1, 2013 - May 4, 2013

Three Little WorldsThe Architecture Foundation, London, UKThree Little WorldsJune 24, 2012 - August 25, 2012

Little MonsterArchitecture League of New York, New York, New York, USANo Precedent: Architectural League Prize for Young ArchitectsJune 21, 2012 - August 3, 2012

Phalanstery ModuleMaterials & Applications, Los Angeles, California, USAGravity DefianceApril 1, 2008 - September 1, 2008

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

Title ForthcomingChicago, Illinois, USAChicago Architectural Biennial, The State of the Art of ArchitectureOctober 3, 2015 - January 3, 2016

Briefcase House The National Museum of Art, Architecture & Design, Oslo, NorwayShow Title Forthcoming2015

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Politics of FlatnessGraham Foundation2015

Citizens of No PlacePrinceton Architectural Press2012

SELECTED AWARDS

Taiwan Pavilion, 2014 Venice BiennaleInternational Competition, First PlaceFundamentals2014

Lisbon Architecture TriennaleInternational Competition, First PlaceClose, Closer2013

Architectural League Prize for Young ArchitectsInternational AwardNo Precedent2012

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Azure Magazine5 Words from Jimenez Lai of Bureau SpectacularMarch 2015

The Architectural ReviewArchitecture with Bad AttitudeMarch 2015

Architect MagazineJimenez Lai’s Youthquake at the Graham FoundationMarch 2015

Architect MagazineArchitect Visits: Bureau SpectacularJune 2014

Refinery 29Studio Stalker: A Peek into this Amazing Vionary’s PlaygroundJune 2013

Architect MagazineCover Photo, Portrait2012

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The Township of Domestic Parts: Made in Taiwan is a collection of nine small houses, each with a single program. This project was built with a generous grant from SinoPac bank in Taiwan and is part of their permanent collection.

Scattered inside the Palazzo delle Prigioni, it forms an interior township of misfit parts. Each house embodies one domestic program, such as the House of Sleep, or the House of Social Eating. As structures not quite big enough to be architecture and too large to be furniture, the nine small houses can be defined as superfurnitures. Isolating the diagrams of part-to-whole relationship and part-to-part relationships, we condensed each domestic program into its own freestanding superfurniture with character.

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The White Elephant tumbles and changes orientation and can flip to eight different stances. What is a building that can tumble freely without gravity or fixed orientations, hard on the outside but soft on the inside, and obstructs the continuity of interior spaces like an elephant in a room? This installation is a freestanding micro building / macro furniture that questions projection, inside/outside, rigidity/fluidity and size/scale.

The White Elephant was collected by The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014.

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Citizens of No Place is a collection of short stories on architecture and urbanism, graphically represented using manga-style storyboards. Fiction is used as a strategy to unpack thoughts about architecture. Modeled as a proto-manifesto, it is a candid chronicle of a highly critical thought process in the tradition of paper architecture (especially that of architect John Hejduk and Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcript). The short stories explore many architectural problems through the unique language of the graphic novel, helping usher the next generation of architectural theory and criticism.

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The Briefcase House, located inside a warehouse loft of 1400 sf with no partition is a house within a house. The design engages two architectural issues: inside/outside and S/XL. It compacts the material possessions of the subject into one oversized briefcase - so large that the subject sleeps inside of it. The residual gap outside of the Briefcase House to the limits of the warehouse loft can be considered a super wall-cavity and rendered as blackened thick wall in an architectural plan. Conversely, when the subject occupies the wall-cavity for other activities, the house can be considered a solid obstruction.

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www.jainjai.comw e m

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jomjai@jainjai.com & jaitip@jainjai.com818.319.2957 & 805.338.1896