Architect Jimenez Lai braved communal desert living at Taliesin West in 2004–05 while studying at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Scottsdale, Arizona. One wouldn't guess that from the projects of Lai's firm, Bureau Spectacular—many of which morph domesticity, outsized furniture, fantasy, and narrative into pavilions and installations—but the experience made a visceral impression.
“At the time, the other students and I saw the poetics of Wright's work, but there were strong techniques deployed and follow-through that I'm trying to emulate,” says Lai, who moved his formerly Chicago-based firm to Los Angeles last fall so that he could teach at UCLA. A current seminar is about movies and storyboarding, a natural topic for Lai, whose graphic novel, Citizens of No Place, published by Princeton University Press in 2012, addressed urbanism and the tradition of paper architects with manga and DC Comics–like drawings.
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