They Have Watches, But We Have Time: A Takeover by WAI Architecture Think Tank

​For one evening, WAI Architecture Think Tank transforms Van Alen Institute into a living postcolonial collage, inspired by the abolitionist Afro-Asian Bookstore of political prisoner Martin Sostre and the mutual-aid restaurants and loudreadings of anarcho-syndicalist and feminist Luisa Capetillo. Through books, artifacts, food, loudreadings, lectures, and performances, the evening questions whose histories the archive preserves alongside:

​Nathalie Frankowski & Cruz Garcia with Ema Yuizarix, WAI Architecture Think Tank

​Luis Othoniel Rosa, writer; Associate Professor of Spanish and Ethnic Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

​Rose Florian, architect and urban designer; Post-Novis

​Daniel Jonas Roche, journalist; News Editor, The Architect's Newspaper

​Lane Rick, architect, artist, and educator; co-founder, Office of Things

​Nora Akawi, architect and curator; Assistant Professor, The Cooper Union

​Iskander Guetta & Quang Vinh Nguyen, designers and curators of the series

​The evening is part of They Have Watches but We Have Time, an exhibition and program conceived by Iskander Guetta and Quang Vinh Nguyen, Swiss designers and researchers in the Master of Environmental Design program at the Yale School of Architecture, in collaboration with the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York on the occasion of Archtober 2026. The project treats time as a material of design, asking how time is measured, organized, and imposed.

​About WAI Architecture Think Tank

​Founded in 2008 by Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski, WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio dedicated to critical spatial practices and alternative design education. Operating across Puerto Rico, France, and the USA, WAI also co-leads LOUDREADERS, an alternative trade school, and Post-Novis, an anti-disciplinary collective. Their work has been exhibited at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and MAAT Lisbon. Garcia and Frankowski have published Universal Principles of Architecture (Rockport Publishers, 2023), A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education (Loudreaders Publishers, 2021), and Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto (NAi010 Publishers, 2020), among others. WAI interrogates architectural norms through collective pedagogy, poetic critique, and radical reimaginings of the built and unbuilt world.

​6 pm: Doors open
6:30 pm: Lecture, Loudreadings, Performance
7:30 pm: Reception

​image credits : WAI Architecture Think Tank

​Notice of Access, Filming, and Photography

​Van Alen is committed to ensuring that all of our events are inclusive and accessible for all participants. Van Alen Institute is on the ground floor and ADA-accessible. If you require accommodations or have any questions about access needs, please email vai@vanalen.org and we will do our best to support your participation.

​When you attend this event, you enter an area where photography, audio, and video recording may occur. By entering the event premises, you consent to such recording media and its release, publication, exhibition, or reproduction.