Is the graphic novel the new medium for architectural expression, or more of a return to form? Jimenez Lai’s new book, Citizens of No Place, flirts with historical references (to the anthropomorphized Chrysler Tower tryst depicted in Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York and Venturi and Scott Brown’s Duck building) while taking readers on a real estate development journey from earth of the present to outer space in the future. If BIG’s Yes Is More represented a shift in architectural discourse from the monograph to the graphic novel, Citizens of No Place moves argument from juries and journals onto newsprint pages, eschewing diagrams and arrows in favor of cartoons and manifestoes. Lai describes the medium as “conflating representation, theory, criticism, storytelling, and design.” Put another way, Lai’s use of the cartoon as a vehicle for theory helps tone down (and poke fun at) contemporary architectural rhetoric to be more palatable for the masses. • $19.95; Princeton Architectural Press, May 2012.
