Above: Lebbeus Woods, "Berlin Free-Zone 3-2," a 1990 proposal for an abandoned government building in reunified Berlin. The structure, more theoretical than practical, has no assigned purpose. More Photos >
via NYTimes:
An Architect Unshackled by Limits of the Real World
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: August 24, 2008
These are lonely times for Lebbeus Woods.
In the early 1990s this irreverent New York architect produced a
series of dark and moody renderings that made him a cult figure among
students and academics. Foreboding images of bombed-out cities
populated by strange, parasitic structures, they seemed to portray a
world in a perpetual state of war, one in which the architect’s task
was to create safe houses for society’s outcasts.
Since then Mr. Woods has become his own kind of outcast.
Architecture
is big business today. 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 a corner of his downtown apartment, a
solitary, monklike figure churning out increasingly abstract
architectural fantasies, several of which are on view in the
“Dreamland” show at the Museum of Modern Art.
Some question the
wisdom of his choices. (They certainly haven’t made him a rich man.)
But that he now stands virtually alone underscores a disturbing shift
in the architectural 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.
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 extended over mountain ranges and across deserts —
were stinging attacks on a professional mainstream that avant-garde
architects believed lacked imaginative energy.
When I was an
architecture student in New York in the early 1990s, the architects my
peers and I admired most were famous for losing competitions, not
winning them. For us it simply meant that their work was too radical,
too bold for the cultural establishment.
This was not just
youthful idealism. Free of mundane professional considerations like
budgets, clients and zoning laws, these architects were able to produce
works that were aesthetically inventive and piercing social
commentaries. And their designs were wildly influential, closely
studied by younger architects who sought to apply their ideas in the
real world.
In 1999 Mr. Woods began working on a series of
designs, including "Terrain 1-2," left, whose fragmented planes were
intended to reflect the seismic shifts that occur during earthquakes.
< Photo: Lebbeus Woods
Mr. Woods, now 68, was a regular fixture of that
scene. In the early 1990s he published a stunning series of renderings
that explored the intersection of architecture and violence. The first
of these, the Berlin Free-Zone project, designed soon after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, was conceived as an illustration of how periods of
social upheaval are also opportunities for creative freedom.
Aggressive
machinelike structures — their steel exteriors resembling military
debris — are implanted in the abandoned ruins of buildings that flank
the wall’s former death zone. Cramped and oddly shaped, the interiors
were designed to be difficult to inhabit — a strategy for screening out
the typical bourgeois. (“You can’t bring your old habits here,” he
warned. “If you want to participate, you will have to reinvent
yourself.”)
Some critics condemned the design for its coldblooded
imagery. But it also turned cold-war Modernism on its head. In the
1950s American architects were striving to retool wartime military
production for the construction of a peacetime paradise. One result was
the mind-numbing conformity of suburban subdivisions. Mr. Woods, by
comparison, has never been so utopian. In his drawings society seems to
be coming apart at the seams. His glistening pods, armored against the
surrounding mayhem, are intended as sanctuaries for society’s most
vulnerable: outcasts, rebels, heretics and dreamers.
This vision
reached its extreme in a series of renderings he created in 1993 in
response to the war in Bosnia. Inspired by sci-fi comics and full of
writhing cables, crumbling buildings and flying shards of steel, these
drawings seem to mock the old Modernist faith in a utopian future.
Their dark, moody atmosphere suggests a world in a constant struggle
for survival.
Things began to change, however, at the end of the
last millennium. High-end architecture was suddenly a valuable
commodity. Architects like Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas,
once relegated to the halls of academia, were suddenly struggling to
handle an abundance of new commissions coming not only from elite
cultural institutions but also from mainstream developers and wealthy
corporations.
Mr. Woods, a large, burly man who still likes an
occasional cigarette, doesn’t try to hide his disdain for this new
reality. “Big corporations today want to present themselves as
benefactors of the human race,” he told me recently, summing up the
current state of affairs. “ExxonMobil runs ads about the ecology now.
And architecture is part of this. It’s a business.”
It’s hard to
disagree with the main thrust of his argument: that architecture has
always needed a place that is wholly free of self-censorship, and that
this place does not exist in the often-contentious exchange between
architect and client. Most of us remember, for example, what happened
to Mr. Koolhaas in the 1997 competition for a major expansion to the
Museum of Modern Art. Choosing to ignore the museum’s internal
politics, he indiscreetly highlighted the museum’s corporate agenda in
his design. An enraged MoMA board instantly dropped him.
The
pressure to smooth over anything in a design that might be perceived as
threatening has only increased in recent years, as a lot of
architecture has begun to look like a sophisticated form of marketing.
Architects who once defined themselves as rebels are now designing
luxury residential towers for the super-rich.
The greatest
influence of this trend, however, may be on a younger generation of
architects. Reared in an era when there seems to be an irresistible
supply of work, these architects often seem eager to build at any cost.
And their facility with computer software can make it easy to churn out
seductive designs without digging deeply into hard social truths.
As
Mr. Woods put it: “With the triumph of liberal democracy and
laissez-faire capitalism, the conversation came to an end. Everyone
wanted to build, which left less room for certain kinds of
architecture.”
Meanwhile, as his peers moved on to bigger, more
lucrative commissions, Mr. Woods’s work has become more and more
abstract. In 1999 he began working on a series of designs whose
fragmented planes were 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.”)
Last year the architect Steven Holl,
a close friend, hired him to design a pavilion for a housing complex in
Chengdu, China. A towering composition of crisscrossing bridges and
ramps, the project is the closest Mr. Woods has come to real
architecture: a dense Piranesian space in which people can climb to
peer out at the urban sprawl of the new China.
“I’m not
interested in living in a fantasy world,” Mr. Woods told me. “All my
work is still 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.”
