MOG

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no "sacred and primordial site." I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then "melt into air." I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.

  Lebbeus Woods, Theory and Experimentation, 1993

 During the early 90s, a derisive New York architect produced a series of dark and uncanny renderings that made him a cult figure amongst students and academics. Foreboding images of bombed-out cities inhabited by bizarre, parasitic structures, they seemed to envision a world in a perpetual state of war and struggle. Mr. Woods is something of an outcast, and even a champion of outcasts.

 Not so long ago many of the world’s greatest architectural talents behaved as though the actual construction of buildings was beneath them. During the 1960s firms like Superstudio in Florence, Italy and Archigram in London were designing urban visions intended to shake up the status quo. These projects- walking, mechanized cities and mirrored megastructures that extend over mountain ranges and across deserts- were stinging attacks on a professional mainstream that avant-garde architects believed lacked imaginative energy.

While most of his friends and colleagues have abandoned their imaginary cities to chase lucrative commissions, Mr. Woods has shown little interest in building. Instead he continues to work at a small drafting table in the corner of his downtown apartment, a solitary, monklike figure churning out increasingly abstract architectural fantasies. Some question the wisdom of his choices. But that he stands virtually alone underscores a disturbing shift in the profession during the past decade or so. By abandoning fantasy for the more pragmatic aspects of building, the profession has lost some of its capacity for self-criticism, not to mention one of its most valuable imaginative tools.

 Nicolai Ouroussoff, NY Times 2008

The early glimpses at Woods’ ideas were from a series of renderings exploring the intersection of architecture and violence. The Berlin Free-Zone Project was conceived to illustrate how periods of social upheaval are opportunities for creative freedom. These were designed shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Portraying cold, cramped post-war buildings dissected by aggressive machinelike structures skinned in debris and twisted steel, some critics condemned the Cold War imagery. The oddly shaped interiors would be difficult to inhabit, and Woods warned, "You can’t bring your old habits here. If you want to participate, you will have to reinvent yourself." The still emerging tastes for utopian landscapes of the 50s, and mind numbing conformity of suburban subdivisions are mocked and criticized by Woods. His drawings reveal a dystopian lifestyle, a society coming apart at the seams. His explorations deal with the design of systems in crisis, the order of the past and the order of the new, in an uneasy, difficult co-existence.  Inspired by sci-fi comics and full of crumbling buildings tangled amongst withering cables and flying shards of steel, they laugh at the traditional Modernist faith.

 In 1999, Woods began work on another abstract series, titled Terrain. Designs whose fragmented and fractured planes are intended to reflect the seismic shifts that occur during earthquakes. "The idea is that it’s not nature that creates catastrophes," he said. "It’s man. The renderings were intended to reflect a new way of thinking about normal geological occurrences."

"I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world. All of my work is meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules."

For me, his work shares a highly musical abstraction. It is probably best described as counter-point, that inflective and revered tool for digging out a universally perceived dramatic feeling. His images absolutely drip with the dramatic. And while they do not look exactly friendly and the next great space, it is this sense of possibility that brings it to the same Orwellian palette musicians’ pull from.

 "The interplay of metrical systems establishing boundaries of materials and energetic forms is the foundation of a universal science whose workers include all individuals."

 Human condition I suppose. His work is on display currently in the Dreamland exhibit at MOMA, NY.  In thinking of bands and songs that mirror and remind of these ideals, Godspeed You! Black Emperor is an easy suggestion, and King Crimson is a personal favorite, considering most of the tone for Starless & Bible Black. Perhaps some choice Isis songs from Panopticon. Or even Burial and Kode 9 bring to mind a numb urban existence. I would like to pose the question, what are your choices for music that braves to look at a world grown cold and exhausted, highly contradicted and even destroyed, the soundtrack for dystopia.