LA’s Normcore Architecture Vanguard Presses On

Bureau Spectacular is obsessed with what the design firm’s frontman, Jimenez Lai, describes as “cartoonish journalism,” a melding of drawing, storytelling, and absurdist projections of heterogenous, contemporaneous realities. An OMA alumnus, prolific artist, serial exhibitionist—and now UCLA professor—Lai has spent the better part of a decade carving out a niche in the architectural profession as his generation’s answer to the so-called “paper architect” by directly challenging the notion that a successful architect has to have built work. He's sucessfully propagated his firm’s accolades almost solely through the act of drawing.

Following Lai’s installation of tiny, single-function houses for Taiwan’s national pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale, and a recent mass exhibition on the architectural treatise for the Graham Foundation, the firm has become firmly entrenched in the contemporary architectural discourse, and expanded its scope of work to include full-scale mock ups and installations. Bureau Spectacular’s latest crop of work exemplifies the Tarantino-esque hodgepodge of narratives and academic objectives the firm uses to express Lai’s ruminations on normalcy and banality in their new home of Los Angeles.

Over the last six months, Bureau Spectacular have exhibited a cave painting at the city’s arty Jai & Jai gallery, revamped existing LA housing typologies for the Art + Design Museum, and filled an exhibition hall in Chicago with large-scale domestic objects for the first ever Chicago Architecture Biennale. The projects aim to reconsider and perhaps revel in the contemporary “culture of congestion” that has only gotten more perverse and confused in the digital era.

Beachside Lonelyhearts treats the Jai & Jai gallery’s walls, floors, and ceilings as a single, continuous surface, creating, as Lai explains, “an archipelago of stretched canvases scattered in the gallery.” The monumental cave painting is presented as an “incorrectly remembered sunny afternoon” scribbled across custom-shaped stretched canvases and interior surfaces.

Exhibited alongside several other visions for the future of LA housing, Five Normal Houses analyzes existing LA housing typologies through the lens of collage-based renderings and scale models, proposing a series of new typological constructions for the city’s neighborhoods. The speculative proposals focus on various aspects of LA culture, like the ubiquitous postwar apartments known as “dingbats” as well as Hockney’s interpretations of automobile and pool culture to pursue “five applications of normal vocabularies of domestic architecture, spoken with some sense of hyperbole.” Currently on view at the city’s A+D Museum in Downtown LA, the proposal pokes fun at LA while simultaneously trying to understand it.

Lastly, Bureau Spectacular’s Chicago Biennale, Furniture Urbanism aims to use a series of large-scale domestic objects like an arch, sofa, dining table, and heart-shaped bed, to explore a “lack of flexibility” in congested environments where “people's’ roles are strongly suggested and their interactions with objects and others can be thought of as theatrical in nature.”

For more information on Bureau Spectular, visit their website.The A+D Museum’s Shelter exhibition runs through November 6th while the Chicago Architecture Biennale is being held at various venues throughout the city through January 3, 2016.

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