Cruz Garcia
Cruz Garcia is a Puerto Rican designer, artist, curator, educator, author, and theorist. Along with French designer, artist, curator, educator, author, and poet Nathalie Frankowski, Garcia is the co-founder of WAI Architecture Think Tank, a planetary studio practicing by questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism. WAI is one of Gracia and Frankowski's many platforms of public engagement, which also include Beijing-based anti-profit art space Intelligentsia Gallery and the free, alternative-education platform and trade school Loudreaders.
Garcia and Frankowski are associate professors at Iowa State University and teach at Columbia University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They have held visiting fellowships and chair positions at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Nebraska—Lincoln, and the School of Architecture at Taliesin. Their work has been part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial as well as exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany, and the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon. They are the authors of Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto, Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture, A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, and the forthcoming book From Black Square to Black Reason: A Post-Colonial Architecture Manifesto.