Polymorphism was an important tactic used by Woods to render objects and spaces in the process of transformation and transmutation. Ashley Simone, Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in New York City, explores the terrain where materiality meets change, where fantasy supplants reality. Her prime example is the suite of drawings for the ‘AEON’ project.
Many 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.
In 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.
Vivid 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.
Setting 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.
Where 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.
As 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.
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