POST-NOVIS
WAI Architecture Think Tank + Luis Othoniel Rosa, Holly Craig, Hilary Wiese, 2019
In 1919, the year the Bauhaus was founded, a laboratory to blur with architecture the line between art and life was formed inside the People’s Art School in the small town of Vitebsk (in what is now known as Belarus). Founded by Kazimir Malevich, and with Lazar Khidekel, El Lissitzky, Ilia Chasnik, Nina Kogan, and Vera Ermolaeva among its ranks, Utverditeli novogo iskusstva - Champions of the New Art (UNOVIS) became one of the first experiments of collective production, developing an idea of architecture searching for ways to transform the world.
In 2019 a hidden archive reveals ongoing and unfinished critical projects carried out after the initial dissolution of UNOVIS. POST-NOVIS presents for the first time a century of works in a radical pedagogical institution carrying out projects against the commodification of knowledge, the indifference of form, normative constructions and social preconceptions. The blueprints of this hidden laboratory, archival material of formal, material, programmatic and ideological experiments present POST-NOVIS as an alternative project of architectural education and practice.
POST-NOVIS presents the mechanisms, actions and projects that carry out the design of a school and its program in its effort to disconnect itself from the commodification of architecture (practice and education). Relying on a system of alternative institutions across the world (within the tropical forests in the Caribbean, and the cornfields in the American Midwest) POST-NOVIS reveals the properties of its camouflaging buildings, the critical nature of its, non-objective, feminist and post-colonial curriculum and the combative characteristics of its architectural projects carried out by teachers and students in their fluctuating roles.
POST-NOVIS is a narrative architecture collaboration between WAI Architecture Think Tank, Dr. Luis Othoniel Rosa Rodriguez, Holly Craig, Hilary Wiese and the POST-NOVIS Collective at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Show Sponsors:
Benson Plant Rescue
Benjamin Moore
Lucky Bucket Brewing Co.
WAI Architecture Think Tank + Luis Othoniel Rosa, Holly Craig, Hilary Wiese, 2019
In 1919, the year the Bauhaus was founded, a laboratory to blur with architecture the line between art and life was formed inside the People’s Art School in the small town of Vitebsk (in what is now known as Belarus). Founded by Kazimir Malevich, and with Lazar Khidekel, El Lissitzky, Ilia Chasnik, Nina Kogan, and Vera Ermolaeva among its ranks, Utverditeli novogo iskusstva - Champions of the New Art (UNOVIS) became one of the first experiments of collective production, developing an idea of architecture searching for ways to transform the world.
In 2019 a hidden archive reveals ongoing and unfinished critical projects carried out after the initial dissolution of UNOVIS. POST-NOVIS presents for the first time a century of works in a radical pedagogical institution carrying out projects against the commodification of knowledge, the indifference of form, normative constructions and social preconceptions. The blueprints of this hidden laboratory, archival material of formal, material, programmatic and ideological experiments present POST-NOVIS as an alternative project of architectural education and practice.
POST-NOVIS presents the mechanisms, actions and projects that carry out the design of a school and its program in its effort to disconnect itself from the commodification of architecture (practice and education). Relying on a system of alternative institutions across the world (within the tropical forests in the Caribbean, and the cornfields in the American Midwest) POST-NOVIS reveals the properties of its camouflaging buildings, the critical nature of its, non-objective, feminist and post-colonial curriculum and the combative characteristics of its architectural projects carried out by teachers and students in their fluctuating roles.
POST-NOVIS is a narrative architecture collaboration between WAI Architecture Think Tank, Dr. Luis Othoniel Rosa Rodriguez, Holly Craig, Hilary Wiese and the POST-NOVIS Collective at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Show Sponsors:
Benson Plant Rescue
Benjamin Moore
Lucky Bucket Brewing Co.
Photos Courtesy of Dan Schwalm
Video Courtesy of Ross Miller
About the Artists:
WAI Architecture Think Tank was co-founded by Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski in Brussels at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis. Following seven years of practice in Beijing, where they co-founded the alternative art space Intelligentsia Gallery, they are former Visiting Teaching Fellows at The School of Architecture at Taliesin and current Hyde Chairs of Excellence in Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Through architectural projects, experimental publishing, pedagogical experiments and curatorial programs Garcia and Frankowski question the critical, political, social, environmental, historical and ideological imperatives of architecture in an era of pressing challenges.
Working across many different formats and mediums, their recent publications include the English and Chinese editions of Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture and their upcoming book Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto; and recent exhibitions include the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial as well as shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon.
They are contributors to alternative magazines and journals around the world including MONU Magazine on Urbanism, Arch+, CARTHA, Dolce Stil Criollo, GAM, Volume, Horizonte, and co-founding curators of Intelligentsia Gallery, an alternative space for the presentation of positions and discourses in art and architecture established in Beijing in 2014.
www.waithinktank.com
Luis Othoniel Rosa Rodríguez is the author of two novels currently being translated, Otra vez me alejo [Once Again I Leave] and Caja de fractales [Fractals in a Box], and the academic book Comienzos para una estética anarquista: Borges con Macedonio [Beginnings for an Anarchist Aesthetics: Borges with Macedonio]. He studied at the University of Puerto Rico and holds a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Princeton University. He is the editor of El Roommate: Colectivo de Lectores. He currently teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and works on two book projects: a sci-fi novel titled The cat in the maelstrom and a research project titled The Plurality of Worlds: Anticapitalist Writing Laboratories.
www.luisothonielrosa.com
Holly Craig and Hilary Wiese are graduate students working with alternative models of architectural thinking, representation and production at the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The POST-NOVIS Collective is formed by undergraduate and graduate students part of FOLD, a curatorial and publishing seminar offered by WAI Architecture Think Tank at the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Members of POST-NOVIS Collective include: Marwa Al Ka’abi, Alec Burk, Aaron Culliton, Charles Dowd, Ben Friesen, Caleb Goehring, Trevor Kirschenmann, Tyler Koraleski, Jessica Larsen, Collin Meusch, Jordan Morris, Manuel Ruiz, Noah Schacher, Adrian Silva, and Megan Waldron.
WAI Architecture Think Tank was co-founded by Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski in Brussels at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis. Following seven years of practice in Beijing, where they co-founded the alternative art space Intelligentsia Gallery, they are former Visiting Teaching Fellows at The School of Architecture at Taliesin and current Hyde Chairs of Excellence in Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Through architectural projects, experimental publishing, pedagogical experiments and curatorial programs Garcia and Frankowski question the critical, political, social, environmental, historical and ideological imperatives of architecture in an era of pressing challenges.
Working across many different formats and mediums, their recent publications include the English and Chinese editions of Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture and their upcoming book Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto; and recent exhibitions include the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial as well as shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon.
They are contributors to alternative magazines and journals around the world including MONU Magazine on Urbanism, Arch+, CARTHA, Dolce Stil Criollo, GAM, Volume, Horizonte, and co-founding curators of Intelligentsia Gallery, an alternative space for the presentation of positions and discourses in art and architecture established in Beijing in 2014.
www.waithinktank.com
Luis Othoniel Rosa Rodríguez is the author of two novels currently being translated, Otra vez me alejo [Once Again I Leave] and Caja de fractales [Fractals in a Box], and the academic book Comienzos para una estética anarquista: Borges con Macedonio [Beginnings for an Anarchist Aesthetics: Borges with Macedonio]. He studied at the University of Puerto Rico and holds a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Princeton University. He is the editor of El Roommate: Colectivo de Lectores. He currently teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and works on two book projects: a sci-fi novel titled The cat in the maelstrom and a research project titled The Plurality of Worlds: Anticapitalist Writing Laboratories.
www.luisothonielrosa.com
Holly Craig and Hilary Wiese are graduate students working with alternative models of architectural thinking, representation and production at the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The POST-NOVIS Collective is formed by undergraduate and graduate students part of FOLD, a curatorial and publishing seminar offered by WAI Architecture Think Tank at the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Members of POST-NOVIS Collective include: Marwa Al Ka’abi, Alec Burk, Aaron Culliton, Charles Dowd, Ben Friesen, Caleb Goehring, Trevor Kirschenmann, Tyler Koraleski, Jessica Larsen, Collin Meusch, Jordan Morris, Manuel Ruiz, Noah Schacher, Adrian Silva, and Megan Waldron.