Lebbeus Woods

Study of Woods' visionary architecture which is concerned with the cultural regeneration of society.

Architecture is a Political Act

Anarchitecture

Jon Calame

Esther Charlesworth

In Jerusalem, Israeli and Jordanian militias patrolled a fortified, impassable Green Line from 1948 until 1967. In Nicosia, two walls and a buffer zone have segregated Turkish and Greek Cypriots since 1963. In Belfast, "peaceline" barricades have separated working-class Catholics and Protestants since 1969. In Beirut, civil war from 1974 until 1990 turned a cosmopolitan city into a lethal patchwork of ethnic enclaves. In Mostar, the Croatian and Bosniak communities have occupied two autonomous sectors since 1993. These cities were not destined for partition by their social or political histories. They were partitioned by politicians, citizens, and engineers according to limited information, short-range plans, and often dubious motives. How did it happen? How can it be avoided? Divided Cities explores the logic of violent urban partition along ethnic lines—when it occurs, who supports it, what it costs, and why seemingly healthy cities succumb to it. Planning and conservation experts Jon Calame and Esther Charlesworth offer a warning beacon to a growing class of cities torn apart by ethnic rivals. Field-based investigations in Beirut, Belfast, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia are coupled with scholarly research to illuminate the history of urban dividing lines, the social impacts of physical partition, and the assorted professional responses to "self-imposed apartheid." Through interviews with people on both sides of a divide—residents, politicians, taxi drivers, built-environment professionals, cultural critics, and journalists—they compare the evolution of each urban partition along with its social impacts. The patterns that emerge support an assertion that division is a gradual, predictable, and avoidable occurrence that ultimately impedes intercommunal cooperation. With the voices of divided-city residents, updated partition maps, and previously unpublished photographs, Divided Cities illuminates the enormous costs of physical segregation.

Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia

Divided Cities

War and Architecture is a timely and moving response by architect Lebbeus Woods to the bombing of Sarajevo. With text in both English and Croatian, accompanied by the author's exquisitely drawn, hauntingly beautiful proposals, the book is both dedicated and addressed to the citizens of this ravaged city. Lebbeus Woods has long been fascinated by the intimate ties between architecture and violence. He identifies the two predominant patterns for rebuilding cities following catastrophic destruction: restoring the city exactly to its previous, "historical" state; or "erasing" the remains of the city to construct a new utopia. These, he argues, are twin forms of denial. Woods draws an analogy to the process of biological and emotional healing, presenting architectural forms that act as "injections," "scabs," "scars," and "new tissue," within the complex organism of a city. "Only by facing the insanity of willful destruction," he argues, "can reason begin to believe again in itself."

Pamphlet Architecture 15: War and Architecture

Lebbeus Woods is widely regarded as the most exciting and original architectural visionary today. His body of theoretical work and extraordinary drawings have served as inspiration for architects, artists, and legions of students. Radical Reconstruction, now available in paperback for the first time, contains projects that address the relationships between architecture and war, political revolution/reaction, and natural disasters. These projects define new approaches to the reconstruction of buildings and urban fabric damaged by unpredictable and largely uncontrollable forces of both human and natural origin.

Radical Reconstruction

Lebbeus Woods is widely regarded as the most exciting and original architectural visionary today. His body of theoretical work and extraordinary drawings have served as inspiration for architects, artists, and legions of students. Radical Reconstruction contains projects from the last five years that address the relationships between architecture and war, political revolution/reaction, and natural disasters. Three projects -- for Sarajevo, Havana, and San Francisco -- define new approaches to the reconstruction of buildings and urban fabric damaged by unpredictable and largely uncontrollable forces of both human and natural origin. Such transformations are not only of physical structures and spaces but, more significantly, of the ways of living they sustain. The majority of these renderings of dazzling color and creativity have never been published or exhibited before.

Diana C. Du Pont

Guy Lafranchi

Research Institute for Experimental Architecture

HISTAORMINA presents new concepts of architectural education and urban design through the lens of an intensive two-week workshop held in September of 2001. With the unique coastal hilltown of Taormina, Sicily as both subject and setting, the authors lead a team of European and American students in an exploration that combines visual and conceptual design, historical references, critical discourse, and both local and global issues with innovative new methods of individual creativity and collaboration. The results are documented in an extensive series of photographs of experimental models and constructions and the working process that produced them. These are accompanied by comments from the students and a text by the authors explaining the concepts behind this new approach and describing its implications for the future.

Workshop 2001

HISTAORMINA

Architekturphilosophische Visionen

Lebbeus Woods, centricity

Richard Rogers

John MacLane Johansen

A Life in the Continuum of Modern Architecture

John M. Johansen

Anthony Vidler

Peter Noever

Manuel De Landa

"This publication - published for the exhibition of the same name is the MAK Vienna - documents the various works comprising the System Wien project. It develops an idea that the making of architecture can be understood as the organization of energy. The project explores how energy relations in public and private city spaces might be represented tectonically in the form of drawings and installations; how existing energy relations in the city can be changed by the input of new energy in the form of highly temporary spatial interventions; and how the future of the city need not depend for creative energy input on the development of building projects requiring large capital investments and institutional approval, but rather on the redistribution of energy at the human scale of the street and the room."--BOOK JACKET.

... Published on the Occasion of the Exhibition, MAK Vienna Wien, 29.06. - 16.10.2005

Lebbeus Woods, System Wien

By any measure, Lebbeus Woods is one of the most original architects working today. His body of theoretical work focuses on buildings of crisis, whether marred by major earthquakes, suffering the effects of economic embargo, or damaged by war. Since the destruction of the World Trade Center, his designs have taken on new meaning and significance. In The Storm and the Fall, Woods brings his visions to a new depth, moving them from feverishly rendered drawings to three-dimensional space. The book focuses on two recent Woods installations - one at the Houghton Gallery at New York's Cooper Union, the other at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris - that address the role of today's architecture. The Storm critiques the geometric box that rules most building designs and proposes instead a dynamic field of potential energy, represented by a complex array of vectors. The Fall crystallizes a built space in the midst of collapse, witnessing a moment too brief to inhabit - except in imagination. Both pieces are explored in Woods's powerful sketches, renderings, models, and constructions, exposing the mutations that enable them to be. A postscript of his hopeful design for a new World Center relates even more of his ideas, and essays by Anthony Vidler and Paul Virilio offer insights into the significance of the work.

The Storm and the Fall

Lebbeus Woods Origins

The first in the new RIEAeuropa Concepts Series, this monograph presents a summary of design research exploring the implications of earthquake for architecture and urban form in regions of seismic instability. The author believes that radically new design strategies are needed for these regions, and he presents his proposals in an extensive series of drawings and models for complex tectonic landscapes formed by unpredictable natural forces. The new RIEAeuropa Concepts Series is a series of monographs that present one new idea/concept per volume. Their audience are primarily students, young architects and people who are eager to encounter innovative new concepts in architecture.

A Post-Biblical View

Earthquake!

Lebbeus Woods is a true visionary, whose drawings are among the richest and passionate as any in the history of architecture. For his first monograph, OneFiveFour, Woods painstakingly drew a book of two-page spreadsthat weave text, architectural elements, math, and physics into a unique vision of a new humanism for the information age. The powerful immediacy of the art makes it one of the most influential books we have ever published. Critic Michael Sorkin says it best: "In the mesmerizing, astonishingly wrought images of Lebbeus Woods...we are plunged into unfamiliar territory, a world of architecture beginning again....His ever-expanding discourse of the almost impossible is aninspiration not just to build, but to think."

OneFiveFour

In the fall of 2007, Lebbeus Woods (1940–2012), long admired for his visionary architecture and mastery of drawing, began a blog. Part forum and part public journal, the eclectic mix of articles, drawings, anecdotes, poetry, interviews, and photographic essays explored topics ranging from architectural theory and criticism to education and politics. Amassing more than three hundred entries by its end in the summer of 2012, it is regarded by many as the most comprehensive and accessible archive of Woods's prodigious creativity. Slow Manifesto: Lebbeus Woods Blog, an edited volume of the blog's centerpiece entries, stands as a fragmentary essay on the nature of architecture that will be dear to architects, students, and thinkers everywhere.

Slow Manifesto: Lebbeus Woods Blog

Karsten Harries

Tracy Myers

Edited by Tracy Myers. Essays by Tracy Myers, Karsten Harries and Lebbeus Woods. Foreword by Richard Armstrong.

Experimental Architecture

Brett Littman

Joseph Becker

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher

"Lebbeus Woods, Architect" brings together drawings from the past 40 years by one of the most influential designers working in architecture. Beyond architects, Woods (1940-2012) has been hailed by designers, filmmakers, writers and artists as a significant voice in recent history; his works resonate across many disciplines for their conceptual depth, imaginative breadth and ethical potency. Woods worked cyclically, returning often to themes of architecture's ability to transform, resist and free the collective and the individual. As an architect whose work lies almost solely in the realm of the proposed and the unbuilt, his contributions to the field opened up new avenues for exploring and inscribing space. The publication centers on transformation as a recurring theme. The organization of the images of works is thematic rather than chronological.

Lebbeus Woods

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