Solitary Vision
In the early 1990s the architect Lebbeus Woods, left, produced a series of dark and moody renderings that made him a cult figure among students and academics. 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 New York apartment, a solitary, monklike figure churning out increasingly abstract architectural fantasies, several of which are on view at the “Dreamland” show at the Museum of Modern Art.
“Berlin Free-Zone 3-2,” a 1990 proposal by Mr. Woods for an abandoned government building in reunified Berlin. The structure, more theoretical than practical, has no assigned purpose.
Mr. Woods’s drawing “War and Architecture 2-2” (1993), provoked by the war in Bosnia.
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.
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.
A pavilion in China that Mr. Woods was hired to design (with Christoph A. Kumpusch).
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.
A project Mr. Woods designed for Havana.
“All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces,” said Mr. Woods. “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.” N.Y. Times
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