This exhibition presents a group of five archetypal monsters—or archi-characters—that visiting faculty member Jimenez Lai has been developing in his practice in recent months. The project is inspired, in part, by John Hejduk’s seminal piece, Victims (1984), which has been analyzed by many subsequent architects as a story about how architecture can be read as characters. Some call them characters, while others call them caricatures, or creatures—but there is something else about the idea of monsters: monsters, in fiction, represent human conditions veering toward the edges of the abnormal. Whereas monsters may depict grotesqueness, deformation, or further forms of otherness, they also are parables that galvanize people to reconsider what is normal. 
 
The exhibition is thematically related to the Design IV option studio that Lai, the Robert Gwathmey Chair in Architecture and Art, is teaching this semester. In conjunction with the exhibition, he will give a lecture titled A Litter of Monsters on March 26th.

Open to Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff. On view in the Third Floor Hallway Gallery.