Jimenez Lai

The 162-story Burj Dubai is the tallest building in the world—for now. Once the economy revives, some developer will surely erect a taller one. And then someone else will put up a skyscraper that’s even taller. Jimenez Lai knows how this will end.

Lai, who teaches architecture at UIC, explores ideas about design and urban planning through comics. It’s a shame the copies of speculative drawings he displays in “Point Clouds” are so fuzzy, because his unstuffy medium suits his complicated subject matter very well. One series explains that the Burj Dubai inspired us to build “skyscraper megacities” that house millions of inhabitants. In 2200, Lai predicts, we complete the Tower of Babel, “a 12-kilometer extrusion of the site formerly known as Central Park.” But the sky’s the limit. In the series’ final drawing, Lai’s protagonist agrees to stay atop a building for a year to prove humans can live next to the stratosphere: “We’ve calculated a 90% survival rate,” a smiling developer assures him.

The other comic featured in “Point Clouds” is equally biting: Lai illustrates life on the “Noah’s Ark Spaceship,” his futuristic reinvention of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, a 1932 utopian concept for a suburban development. This series is less accessible to viewers who aren’t architecture buffs, but its crisp sketches of the Ark’s creepy “individual dwelling units” suggest comics’ great potential to communicate about design.

The show’s main attraction—Lai’s double-height, interactive installation (pictured)—regrettably overpowers the architect’s small drawings and study models. But it’s fun to rearrange this piece’s PVC components and phosphorescent nodes. Not every structure has to be an inflexible monument to ego.

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