The Tower of Twelve Stories is essentially a full-scale section model, a 52-foot-tall structure peeled open from top to bottom to expose the interior action. Its modules come together not in exacting cubes, but rather in cartoonish spaces of different shapes, some barely touching and others snug in place.
The installation responds to Rem Koolhaas’ notion of the “typical plan,” or generic sameness, of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, a wholly American architectural archetype that presumably adapts to any kind of business that occupies it. Lai offers a more animated vision: a cartoonish metropolis of tiny bubble-like spaces populated by eccentric characters. The title of his four-story structure traces to the Leonard Cohen classic “Tower of Song,” whose lyrics refer to observations — “coughing all night,” “they don’t let a woman kill you,” “you hear these funny voices” — in the “tower of song.”
