At surface, the faces of rising eastern capitalist cities are peel and stick: Facades quick to arrive and disappear under false hopes and dematerialized dreams. Patterns mesmerize in slight deception and upon closer inspection the mask comes off. What remains solely are shells of anticipation... and the emptiness of borrowed time.
Images courtesy of and sampled from ARCHITECTURE online- public tribute comments. Rising Waters_ departing lives ---Oct 2012 NYC Remembering Lebbeus Woods
1940-2012
I first remember meeting Lebbeus Woods in 1995 at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the College of Environmental Design. He had been invited to give a public lecture in Boulder and studio critique for forth year students in the college. Like a few of my classmates at the time we were impressionably arrested by his gift for making the impossible- in brief, his drawings were mesmerizing and beyond static visions of our world and the architecture we assume daily. His visionary 'Architecture' indeed had boundless possibilities, both in how one speaks of it- as Lebbeus did- and how we render it as conflicting extensions of our tangled world; political, social, poetic, and beyond. His ungrounded creations captured what it meant to 'make' and for me an essential example I still impart on my students today in lectures that I give. His work was deep, inspiring and cross generational.
"..Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.” LW, New York Times interview, 2008.
This page is a collection of observations and ideas about the cities and environments, the architecture and art, that we experience both momentarily and eternally. It is meant to be read as a random amalgam of points of view from various points in time. Much like the city itself as a random, ever condensing, collection of 'things', this page will continue to become dense with words and images.
