After sharing Steven Holl's tribute to visionary architect and artist Lebbeus Woods, who passed away earlier this week, Domus turns to its archives to share a 2005 article by Michael Sorkin, who pointed out that Woods's projects combine "the social with the material at a precisely controlled conceptual level, and the results are breathtaking and mysterious".
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This article was originally published in Domus 877 / January 2005
Into the Woods
While we are rich in form-makers and
technicians, Lebbeus Woods's genius is to combine visionary
tectonics and a staggering imagination with a
deepening and insistent ethical imperative. Indeed,
his research examines the fundamentals of
embodiment and the ways in which architecture
absorbs and expresses the nature of the political,
particularly at the margins.
For Woods, politics is ambient. As a manifestation
of culture, the political accretes all the
styles of knowledge and media of expression that
surround it. In a political architecture — by which
I mean one that actively propagandises — there is
an expressive supplement to the programmatic,
the site of architecture's most deeply intrinsic
understanding of social relations. In this sense
Woods creates an architecture of persuasion.
The work of Lebbeus Woods proposes a kind
of epistemological unified field theory in which
architecture is responsible for a content that articulates
its character in both mind and matter.
Into the Woods
In the pages of Domus in 2005, Michael Sorkin explained how Lebbeus Woods practises an "architecture of persuasion": cosmogonic landscapes created by carefully interwoven pencil colours that nonetheless describe a different way of producing architecture, with absolute conviction.
View Article details
- Michael Sorkin
- 02 November 2012
- Pittsburgh
Woods's work has had a long and intimate relationship
to physics and cosmology, particularly
phlogiston theory and chaos. The trajectory of his
projects virtually recapitulates the history of celestial
mechanics, beginning with a Copernican
interest in the cyclical behaviour of bodies and
now absorbed with more notional — more invisible
— behaviours of particles. This analogous
system provides Woods with a medium capable
of combining the social with the material at a
precisely controlled conceptual level and the results
are breathtaking and mysterious.
A marvellous exhibit of Woods's work now at
the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh shows
the range and development of his thinking as well
as the prodigious and growing span of his technique.
His Centricity project of 1987 speculates
about an intertwining of urban form and the concentric
shells of the atom. What is striking about
this work is the way in which the metaphors function
reciprocally. Architecture becomes a tool for
investigating physics and vice versa. Of course, this
is not a technique for uncovering primary physical
attributes but for organising our imperfect
knowledge of such events for comprehensible expression
as part of the everyday.
The Aerial Paris project of 1989 extends this
inquiry. Here Woods confronts architecture's
most compelling physical constraint: gravity.
Utilising some mysterious and pervasive energy
— one we know to be there but are presently
incapable of tapping — he creates a series of
habitations that float and dance in the sky
above the city, housing a magical endo-atmospheric
circus. What better place for a band of
performers whose "practice" defies both physical
and social gravity.
Beginning in the early 1990s, Woods's work
takes a more demonstrably and localised political
turn.The Berlin Freespace project of 1990—1991
invents an architecture of parasitic insinuation, a
system of spaces that burrow under the city and
inhabit existing buildings. The spaces themselves
— complexly described but imprecisely, "freely"
inhabited — propose the propagation of freedom
by means of an autonomously acting spatial
eruption, an expression of the spread of choice
that assaults the received architecture of sameness
and constraint. A large part of the project's
fascination — as with so much of Woods's work —
is in the precision of the design. His work is only
"un-costructable" because of the limits of our
ambition, not of our technology.
In a political architecture — by which I mean one that actively propagandises — there is an expressive supplement to the programmatic, the site of architecture's most deeply intrinsic understanding of social relations. In this sense Woods creates an architecture of persuasion
Shortly after the Berlin project, Woods began a long relationship with the city of Sarajevo, one which brought him there repeatedly, even during the worst of the violence. His speculation focused both on the destruction of the city and the nature of future redress. Throughout, his concern was both with the institutions of civic life after the war and with the meaning of repair. Confronting a default of simple restoration, Woods directed his work to a transformation that paid appropriate respect to the reality of the trauma. Here, he introduces an explicit biologism — long part of his often organic formal palette — to structure his investigation of healing. Buildings — however humble or damaged — are assigned a compassionate subjectivity and mend as the body might, with scabs and scars, transplants and patches. Woods recuperates to the mesmerising horror of war not by juxtaposing some mawkish image of the benign but by co-opting — turning — the results in another direction. What he does not do is glamorise or aestheticise destruction, but look to the effects of war for the seeds of reconstruction.
In 1995 Woods produced a project for Havana
(represented by an utterly fantastic model in the
show) that is startling in both its form and its
practicality. The proposal lines the Malecon — the
Havana seafront — with a series of giant moving
plates that can be raised during storms to prevent
the flooding that is a persistent problem for
the city. The project is as canny as it is beautiful.
By creating a work that has a single and unassailable
function, one that traditionally belongs
in the realm of engineering rather than art,
Woods both celebrates the beauty and tenacity
of the city and challenges the long history of
official strictures on "pure" expression in building.
It is altogether brilliant.
At about the same time he undertook his
Havana project, Woods designed a series of
structures for San Francisco under the rubric
"Inhabiting the Quake". These buildings continue
several on-going themes including recovery
from/acknowledgement of disaster, architectures
of shards and pieces, and the ways in
which the new finds its home. More important,
however, is the positioning of the project in relationship
to the primal tectonics of slipping
plates. Like his on-going tango with gravity, this
absorption with the nature of the terrestrial
speaks to architecture's most abiding fundamentals:
earth, space, gravity, and society.
In his latest turn, Woods has been investigating
another boundary between abstraction and
representation. In a series of installations — in
New York, Paris and now Pittsburgh — Woods has
constructed fields of bent metal rods, blizzards of
tangled linearity. These installations have a
sibling relationship to many of his current drawings
— likewise greatly abstracted — in which
compositions made up of angular lines coalesce
to describe a building in a state of becoming, and
not yet recognisable. There is incredible dynamism
in this work that dazzles simply as form.
However, these projects resonate harmonically
with the longer history of Woods's preoccupation.
Like the trails of particles in a cloud
chamber, the rods embody a primary, almost religious
observation about the order of things.
They also suffuse the spaces they occupy with resistance
and ambiguity, impossible to inhabit in
any conventional way. Finally, they represent
the irreducible core of the act of architectural invention:
the making and consolidating of line,
the representation of boundaries. Our own have
been immeasurably enlarged by the work of
Lebbeus Woods. Michael Sorkin