Lebbeus Woods Research Articles

The Heuristics of Heroism: Lebbeus Woods Notebooks (1988–1997) at the Getty Research Institute Special Collections

This paper introduces the notebooks of Lebbeus Woods (1940–2012) as a substantive document in the œuvre and critical practice of the New York architect. Dating from 1988 to 1997, this previously unpublished trove includes hand-written notes and over three hundred drawings. Held at the Getty Research Institute, these twenty notebooks cover a wide range of topics, from theoretical musings, to political statements, to fragments from everyday life. Crucially, these documents also reflect the period of Woods’ interest and involvement in the Bosnian War, leading to the publication of War and Architecture in 1993. Complementing his published and exhibited works, Woods’ notebooks are a daily register of his travels, stochastic thoughts, and of his struggles with a continued belief in the possibility of architecture as an intellectual pursuit against the context of modern geopolitical catastrophe. Our brief examination presents these important documents from three major vantage points: drawings, writings, and their theoretical synthesis.

Catalytic Moments, Friendships and Journeys

AbstractWhen an architectural argonaut whose creative life was spent on a quest to open more possibilities for architecture meets another, a special mutual respect is instilled. Peter Cook, Archigram co‐founder and doyen of the Architectural Association (AA) in the 1980s, recalls his initial encounter and some of the moments he has shared with Lebbeus Woods over the decades.

Magical Transubstantiations: A Voyage to Italy

AbstractVisiting Italy in 1978 as part of his own Grand Tour, Lebbeus Woods was able to see some of the treasures of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The ensuing mix of reality and imagination prompted the Editors of this 2, Aleksandra Wagner and Neil Spiller, to consider the visual travelogue –Cityscapes – in a similar manner, combining speculation and truth.

In Place of Light: On Early Writings

AbstractWhere is one's voice to be found? Not all architects search for it in both drawing and writing. Eliyahu Keller, an architectural historian working at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, examines one of Lebbeus Woods's distinct early tropes: an ever‐tense continuum between the image and the text. His ocular reading of Woods's scripts diagnoses their involvement with a darkness of an age, not its light.

Inventing the World: In and Around Illinois, 1960–75

AbstractSome of Lebbeus Woods's formative years were spent on the ‘flat, treeless plain’ at the University of Illinois School of Architecture and at various home and studio addresses in Urbana‐Champaign. Architectural historian Sharon Irish describes the dynamic setting of this urban stage and Woods's personal and professional preoccupations of the time.

Exit Velocity: Einstein Tomb

AbstractAs the 1970s faded, Lebbeus Woods set about memorialising the great theoretical physicist Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity. A cosmic scale and an anti‐gravity mode of this visual and poetic remembrance is embodied in his Einstein Tomb project. Joseph Becker, Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, articulates its evolution, marrying Woods's cyclic epistemology with the quadripartite mandala form.

Framing the Sky, Etching Clay: Walls of the Midwest

AbstractThe American Midwest with its own architectural histories and topologies may be termed a land of few walls. Architect Kevin Erickson examines Lebbeus Woods's relation to this landscape and the genesis of his preoccupation with walls, not as protectors of boundaries, but as sites of dialogue and collaboration. Rather than mere surfaces for large paintings, walls – new or abandoned – invite reflection on the relationship between art and architecture.

Self‐Portrait with Burned Weapon: The Wound That Does Not Heal

AbstractSetting aside organic metaphors of growth and maturation, architect and author Mark Dorrian addresses the ‘early work’ by attending to Lebbeus Woods's descriptively yet evocatively named Black Notebooks. Turning his mind's eye to the Notebooks as a record of the interior struggles of their author – as spiritual diaries – he takes on the symbolism of the wound that must be suffered, and finds much that sheds light on the younger Woods and on his lasting ambitions for architecture.

Myth and Measure: Drawings of the 1970s

AbstractMany of the 1970s’ drawings of Lebbeus Woods feature disguised human form. The most classical physiognomies maintain links with a primordial, even reptilian antipode. Lawrence Rinder, Director Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, explores the manifestations of figure in Woods's private mythology, and points to the uncanny synergy of its themes and compositions with works by Giambattista Tiepolo.

From Experimental Epistemology to Experimental Architecture

AbstractA life‐long beacon for Lebbeus Woods was his understanding of the ideas of second‐order cybernetics and attempts to assimilate them into his architectural projects. An introduction to this discourse was provided in Urbana‐Champaign in the early 1960s by his most important intellectual mentor, cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster. Poised at the intersection of architecture and cybernetics, Ben Sweeting charts some of the lines of their interactions and friendship.

Post‐Apocalypse: The ‘Ring’ Cycle

AbstractIn the late 1970s, Lebbeus Woods embarked on an ambitious project: to depict Richard Wagner's The Ring Cycle. Jörg H Gleiter, Professor of Architectural Theory at the Technical University Berlin, takes us through the intersected worlds of music, drama and visual expression, suggesting that both Wagner and Woods are critics of Enlightenment. Exploitation of Earth, greed and envy are the beginning of the End, for Wagner. A century later, Woods extends this negative mythology.

Lebbeus – A Postmodernist? Early Scenes of Shopping and Dwelling

AbstractVivid colours, commedia dell’arte, collage and hypergraphics, and villae jutting out of the cliffsides designed for the unknown dwellers – are these projects postmodern? American art, architecture and design critic Aaron Betsky investigates this question and its context, focusing on the V.I.P. Center Shopping Mall, an unbuilt scheme that was to win Lebbeus Woods his first professional acknowledgement under the auspices of the Progressive Architecture Award.

Public Spaces and Conflict Transformation: From Mostar’s Old Bridge to Its United World College

The purpose of this analysis is to offer a complementary approach to top-down ethnic conflict resolution which depends upon international organizations, peace treaties, laws, and political elites. While legal and institutional approaches can possess merit, they neglect the necessity of engaging people and rebuilding community. Further, citizens can perceive a top-down approach as coercive. This paper focuses upon an alternative approach of transformation through the construction of post-war public spaces which create places for interaction and sociability, and thereby possess healing power. We adopt the philosophy of architect Lebbeus Woods, who offered specific principles for the post-war reconstruction of Sarajevo. These guidelines included an acknowledgement of the damage and destruction, but also the necessity of community participation in rebuilding. We also accept the contentions of Keller Easterling who identified the potential coerciveness of ‘extrastatecraft’, that is structures imposed upon a community from above by the state, or from outside by international organizations. The specific focus of this research is upon Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the work of international organizations and national political leaders ended the military conflict in 1995, but still fails to reconcile the three ethnic groups to a shared future. The method is rooted in comparative political anthropology, which entails an evaluation of processes, agency, and structures, as well as an account for the emotional aspects of identity and politics. Interviews regarding conflict and reconstruction, and ethnographic observations of public spaces are employed. The work concludes that the contributions of the United World College – Mostar contrasts to the relative failure of the reconstruction of the Old Mostar Bridge partially are due to the emphasis of the former on community engagement and inclusion. The results admit the difficulty of post-conflict transformation in ethnically divided systems, but contend that both the process and outcome of community engagement in the reconstruction of public spaces facilitates reconciliation and democratization.

More Lasting than the Effects Achieved by a Gun: The Cinematic Architecture of Lebbeus Woods

This paper examines Lebbeus Woods’ 1988 project “Underground Berlin” and a corresponding film script coauthored by Woods, in an exploration into affinities between cinematic thinking and architectural imagination. Placing Woods’ professional and theoretical engagement with film within the constellation of discourses regarding film’s relationship with the built environment, this paper posits “Underground Berlin” as a unique example in which architectural representation, cinema, and storytelling come together in the imagination of futures and offer a renewed capacity for architecture to operate politically in the world.

Accelerating Towards Abundance: Planetary Strategies in the Era of the Anthropocene

AbstractBased at Troy in Upstate New York, the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is directed by Dean Evan Douglis. He describes the school's worldview and the challenges that architecture must help to solve. Evoking the influence of characters such as Lebbeus Woods and Buckminster Fuller on the school's mission, he takes us on a journey through some of the recent high points of the student output in his professional and graduate research programmes.

‘Architects in war’: wartime destruction and architectural practice during the siege of Sarajevo

During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1996), standard practices of architectural investigation and design processes, such as visiting specific sites, became too dangerous. Located in a valley, Sarajevo was besieged for four years. It was subjected to constant military attacks. The destruction of the city followed two directions. At the same time that shelling was undoing the city’s architecture, the control and remote occupation of public space by sniper gunmen instigated the creation of ephemeral spaces for protection and survival. The military siege rescaled the urban landscape and people’s homes. In 1993, architect Zoran Doršner documented how this had also transformed the architectural programme of typical modernist dwellings into self-organised spaces. Documenting the shelling of the city and its destruction during the war, Sarajevo’s architects were directly engaged with the ‘city at war’. Relying on their experience of survival and their pre-war architectural practice, they created temporary methods for the architectural observation and documentation of the city under destruction. Ivan Štraus witnessed the destruction of the city from his terrace. He gathered his observations in a diary entitled ‘Architects and Barbarians’ (1995). In 1993, Lebbeus Woods visited Sarajevo. Taking the role of a journalist, he presented his pamphlet War and Architecture. To understand architects’ practices in the wartime city, this article revisits documents that were produced during the war. These include the abovementioned diary and pamphlet, the reports on Sarajevo’s destruction published in the special issue of ARH architecture magazine on ‘Warchitecture’ (1993), and archival photographs, sketches, and drawings. The work and role of ‘architects in war’ remains largely unexplored in architectural theory and history. Through the methods employed by Sarajevo’s architects and citizens, this article attempts to introduce a research lexicon of architectural practices and ephemeral interventions by ‘architects in war’.

Czy potrzebujemy „architektury oporu”?

Do we need “architecture of resistance”?The modern city design adapts to the consumer behavior of its inhabitants. The city-dwellers, under various slogans and ideologies, are willing to pay for their apparent security and live in a soulless yet sheltered residential development spaces. The American visionary and architect Lebbeus Woods has recognized architecture as a political act. He also thought that most architects are egotistical, self-styled executives who consider themselves creators. In view of the increasing tendency of ghettoisation of public space in cities, a critical attitude has to be adapted. By analyzing the mechanisms of spatial segregation, I point to the architecture of resistance gaining in importance as a form of fulfilling utopia in the creation of an inclusive city.

La recuperación del cómic: Neutelings & Riedijk, Sanaa y Lebbeus Woods

<p>La recuperación de las historias dibujadas , que hoy conocemos como Cómic, ha permitido dotar a la representación arquitectónica de un gran potencial expresivo, que actúa como apoyo y transmisión de ideas y conceptos de una manera fácil y atractiva.<strong> </strong><strong></strong></p><p>Los arquitectos comienzan a manejar el lenguaje del cómic como medio de comunicación, en los manifiestos revolucionarios de Archigram, en el <em>story-board</em> de Superstudio, en los <em>comics-books </em>de Koolhaas y del grupo Big, en las llamativas viñetas de Neutelings & Riedijk y de Sanaa y en la invención de ciudades imaginarias de Lebbeus Woods.</p><p>El cómic es representado o bien en forma de viñetas, o bien con un enfoque más diagramático, o siguiendo el más puro estilo del cómic popular. Los diferentes grafismos utilizados son un ejemplo de su aportación al lenguaje arquitectónico contemporáneo<strong> </strong>como vehículo de investigación y de expresión de la esencia del proyecto.</p>

Detailing the Walled Garden for Lebbeus

AbstractNeil Spiller, the Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London, has an unrivalled international reputation for the virtuosity of his visionary graphic work. Here, in a highly personal and poetic eulogy to Lebbeus Woods, Spiller pays tribute to his master through the lens of his own work, where detail becomes an important element in an imagined, augmented world in which the concrete or the specific lends credence to the fictional.

Autonomy and presupposition in architecture: Lebbeus Woods' Berlin and Sarajevo projects

The architectural theories of Lebbeus Woods present a number of philosophical problems. Of particular interest in this paper is Woods' thinking about autonomy and self-determinism in architecture. He claims that the architect should ‘recognise his own autonomy’ before ‘designing for other self-determining individuals’. The logical impossibility inherent in the juxtaposition of these claims is investigated with reference to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.Wittgenstein provides a critique of metaphysics that is based on a strong valuing of socio-cultural context. Woods, on the other hand, proposes theoretical accounts of architecture that contain the fallacious appeal to autonomy. The appeal, however logically false, is critical to the theoretical position cast in terms of ‘heterarchy’. The appeal also supports the presupposition of society and culture that in turn allows for a sense of architectural solution. In the case of Woods' proposals for Berlin and Sarajevo projects, it is shown that the sense of architectural solution cannot amount to a real solution to the socio-cultural problems facing the people of these war torn cities.