TMA! Lebbeus Woods: Design Hero [S1:E4]

Video published June 5, 2015, on YouTube.

The New York Times obituary for Lebbeus Woods reads, as its final remark, this quote from the deceased:

Architecture should be judged not only by the problems it solves, but by the problems it creates.

Since my introduction to his work in the 1995 film 12 Monkeys, I have been attracted to this man’s art not only for its unique aesthetic, but due to the underlying policy illustrated in their lines. Although irrational to many, Woods presents a new manner to examine human-scaled design as an expression of hope, protection, and politically-charged communication against power structures who will not, or perhaps, cannot listen.

Unlike many who take for granted the seemingly innocuous program of our surroundings, from a young age, Woods was directly aware of architecture as a member of a great societal performance, yoked in war and discovery. His father, a civil engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project while Woods was a young child, was an agent of the built environment who not only empowered atomic progress, but he himself died prematurely from his exposure to such rapid scientific exploits. Problem solved, problem created.

Luckily for the architect and fans like myself, Woods was exposed as a child to places like these:

Perhaps this is why I relate to his work so warmly, as when I was a child, I was exposed to scenes like these:

For years, I was convinced that Woods was a ghost writer, or artist, or inspiration for Peter Chung’s animated Aeon Flux. To date, I have not found any evidence of this conviction.

In review of his work, it is impressive to simply account for his locations in their time of consideration. He purposefully delineates a course to design hope from a place of true despair. His renderings are a guiding light, a reminder that the future is not known, that you cannot lose your own belief in human innovation as there are situations we still do not even know how to exist within. His work insists we resist; we resist for justice, resist complacency, resist even the natural order of the universe in favor of joy; in favor of experimental existence.

Havana, San Francisco, Sarajevo, New York, Berlin, Paris, the DMZ, Croatia; these are projects presented for places caught after disaster, stuck in time but unwilling to stand destroyed.

And one of my favorite of his projects is his submission for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center after 9–11. A New Yorker by choice, Woods proposed a project that was never complete, that provided multiple experiences for occupants and visitors alike; from the pilgrim to tourist. This program of constant amendment lends well to his life-long beliefs for social space, as he stated in his 1992 monograph:

Architecture is a political act. The long version: all innovative architecture engages ethical issues that have profound political consequences.

Years earlier in 1999, not far from the World Trade Center site, Woods suggested damming the Hudson & East Rivers to create a literal Lower Manhattan, a new underground to New York as a place of unique experiences and of an unfamiliar scale. If I were to read too deep into this design, I would suggest he was reflecting on the dam that was part of his father’s plan at the Arnold Engineering Development Center of Tennessee, where systems are now fed by the reservoir named in his father’s honor. For the patriarch, water is reclaimed to innovate & create. For the son, water is held back, presenting an unnatural sense of a well-known place. Although opposite in scheme, their ends are the same; that is, both are physical policies meant to repossess a sense of wonder and innovation for a nation they undoubtedly love.